


We'll Sleep Tonight

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Series: We'll Sleep Tonight Universe [1]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War II, Angst, Drama, F/M, Genderswap, Pregnancy, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-27
Updated: 2010-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:51:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years after he left San Francisco for Britain to fight in the war, Sulu meets Chekova at Bletchley Park, where she works as a code breaker with Spock, an escaped German mathematician, Uhura, a civilian translator assisting them, Kirk and McCoy, aides-de-camp to Lt. General Pike. As the war rages on, changing their world even as they try to protect and reclaim what they know, each of them find out what can grow and what can endure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

_January 1943_

The sun starts going down in late afternoon and the temperature plummets with it. The January chill isn’t really so bad. Polina tells herself that her parents endured worse in the Great War and the poverty under the tsar. When the clock on the wall chimes five o’clock and the safety of daylight and warmth evaporates onto the horizon, though, she trembles as the cold goes deep into her bones; something not even a coat can battle. She sets down her pen and rubs her hands into her eyes, then stands up and switches off the electric lamp on her desk. They’re safe here, but Polina’s been convinced that it’s a matter of time before the Germans realize where they are and all the planes from the Blitz will come back and destroy them. Even sleeping in a bunker has never been enough, though she’s slept in a proper bed every night for well over a year now, and even though only three bombs have ever fallen on the premises of the house, early in the war. She still wakes up and hears the planes: real ones from the base nearby, though the noise is a constant buzz, white noise underlying everything else that’s increased since the Americans arrived.

Good luck and crossword puzzles are the only reasons Polina is at Bletchley Park. Her maths scores were always high, but that was only the start of it. A nine-minute crossword puzzle and a bit of encouragement from her father landed her here, serving the only country she’s ever known as home. Her parents came here in the revolution, rescued by an old research colleague of her father’s, but Polina wasn’t born yet, so all she knows of Russia is the few, tattered photographs her father preserved, a language that sounds awkward on her tongue, and long-off memories that pulse in her blood, the story of how she’s even alive: a mark of an outsider.

The other women she works with are nice enough, but even as she tucks a scrap of paper into her pocket, she doesn’t lift her head to join into the idle chatter among the rest of them. She grew up on the outside of an invisible barrier between her and the other girls in her school, but the war changed things, and her relationships with these women are much different. She’s tired out from her idle fears, but she dreams every night of planes and the pilot she met before the Blitz, and of the main house bursting in a blast of hot air and flames.

“Polly!”

She inherited the nickname when she came here, about five minutes after she introduced herself to Janice, who is smiling at her while adjusting the pins in her hair, but Polina smiles at it now. It’s been two years too long for her to start minding now. “Janice,” she says in a much more even tone, the faintest hint of a smile playing on her face.

Janice smoothes the creases in her skirt and smiles at her, beckoning her over. “Are you going to the party tonight?”

She nods, though she hasn’t been to one since Christmas, and this one is a small, arbitrary gathering to meet a new wave of servicemen assigned to the nearby base. Most of them will be Americans, she knows, because that’s the way it’s been since the Americans entered the war with the promise of a breath of life for Britain, even though everything seems the same with or without them. Still, there’s not much she can believe in without proof in front of her. She believes in the war, in the ongoing terror that they might die, that they’re going to lose the war. There’s a stack of messages to decode at her workstation that seem to indicate that things are always worse than they seem, though she knows she’s holding some of the most sensitive information about the ongoing war, and that’s better than it could be. She doesn’t believe in false hope, in the whispers that Hitler’s dead, the Germans are rioting against him. She doesn’t believe in the absent God, she’s never found any indication that God is real in anything she’s ever read that she can rely on, and she sees faith slipping out of the eyes of everyone around her where God was once so strong. The war has hardened them all, left them hard and unshakable, enduring where they might have once broken apart. It’s almost a way of life now instead of an interim existence, as if the war will go on forever and people will learn how to adapt their lives to it just to survive. They give up their naive notions of God for strength, and it’s a fair trade.

“I’ll be there,” she tells her, though she doesn’t really want to be. She’s finished all her reading for the month, and no one’s taken her up on her offer to trade food rations for cloth rations, so it’s not even like she’s got a new dress she could be sewing for herself, clumsy as ever.

“Good. I’d hate for you to miss the new guys.” Janice winks at her cheerfully and leads her out of the building. Polina only looks back once, at the work she has left to do on Monday morning, and shuts off the lights behind her.

When they walk to town, Polina is sure she can hear the whine of engines, but the night is quiet and cold, cloudy with only a light drizzle of rain and Janice’s laugh echoes across the streets when Marlena tells a joke. She shakes out the tension in her shoulders and the permanent tightness between her eyebrows and smiles at them, but her laugh is dusty and rough with disuse and she lets it fade hollowly into the night.

The building is warm, and when she steps inside and peels off her coat, she scans the room, but of all the faces she pauses to examine, hers is the only serious one. Everyone else, she thinks, is moving on because there’s nowhere else to go but forward. It’s when she’s loosening her scarf that her hands slips and her elbow crashes into someone and her head snaps up, an apology falling out immediately when she sees an RAF uniform. It isn’t until her eyes finally make it up to his face that she even notices. She looks back down and sees that while some of the decorations on his uniform are familiar enough, some aren’t, and his dark eyes are smiling.

“Sorry for that,” he says and looks so earnest about it that she’s sure he gets away with a lot with that kind of attitude. The cadence of his accent gives him away as an American, and she hums in surprise, staring up at his face.

She pulls her elbows back in toward herself and feels her face heat in embarrassment. “It’s all right,” she assures him. “My own fault.”

His face bursts into a genuine smile and holds out his hand to her. Two stripes, Flight Lieutenant. “I’m Hikaru Sulu.” He pauses, and then laughs, as if he knows that all the variables don’t add up quite right, but he doesn’t really want to have to explain.

“Polina,” she introduces automatically, resting her hand gently in his before giving it a firm squeeze, which he returns with a brighter grin. “Chekova.” She examines him quickly, sweeping her eyes up from his feet to his handsome face. “You must be one of the new Americans,” she comments lightly, though her eyes pierce into his as if to explain that she knows that isn’t the case. He doesn’t shy away, just meets her stare with his own, easy and sincere but no less intense.

“I’m not with the Americans,” he explains, and his smile doesn’t diminish at all for it. “I’m just visiting, in case I know any of them. I’m stationed at Benson.”

“I see.” She says nothing about his contradictions, the variables that don’t add up, but the solution they indicate evident, what it must mean for him to be here. He is here, though, and so he’s trustworthy, at least as far as the military is concerned. “I work--”

“Nearby,” Hikaru answers for her with the same, amiable smile that tells her that he knows what she means before she says it, too. “I come up from time to time.” There’s nothing but silence and the echoing sounds of the party spinning around them, but Polina doesn’t look away, and Hikaru keeps looking at her like she’s particularly interesting.

“You’re American, though,” she remarks plainly, challenging him for the truth, and he looks down at their shoes.

“I’m American,” he agrees, but the words are solemn rather than reflective of the kind of pride she’s seen in other Americans, and then he gives her a half smile like a reconciliation. “Or I was, anyway.”

Polina looks down at his boots and understands the way all the odd pieces fall together like a heap of stones on her heart. She’s run out of things to say to him, but Hikaru rescues her when he leans over to speak into ear. “These parties don’t interest me so much.”

“Meeting new people isn’t your thing?” she asks and raises her eyebrows at him, which only seems to make him laugh. She knows she looks silly when she tries to look severe, so she laughs with him. “Because if it isn’t, then maybe—”

“I like people,” he assures her, peeling back enough to give her space. “I just wanted to ask you if you were interested in getting out of here, but I’m kind of bad at this.” He has the grace to look embarrassed when Polina raises her eyebrows even higher, because she knows exactly what he’s getting to.

“I’d like that,” she finally concedes and ignores him when he holds out his arm for her, just follows him, gathering their coats back up and heading into the cold night. She says nothing, but he watches her adjust her scarf until she finally looks back at him.

“I’m not really good at faking conversation,” he explains and she laughs warmly this time, like something coming to life from the cold ground after the long winter. Life goes on, even in the war. She can laugh and remember what it’s like to be a girl, to flirt with a man, and it’s not even so surprising when Hikaru brushes a piece of hair away from her mouth. This is what they do, stay alive in their hearts, and no one can win the war against them, not when it’s possible to feel this.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he says, chuckling along with her, but he doesn’t even reach for her hand. A gentleman. Polina laughs again, harder.

“I’m never going to see you again,” she tells him when she takes her next breath and calms down, reminding both of them where they are: still only a few meters from the building, hardly out of sight of anyone else who could choose to leave the party. “Even if I kissed you now, I’ll never even—”

Hikaru brushes aside the formalities, the lingering awkwardness in the air, and when his fingers land on the curve of her jaw and tip her face up toward his, she feels like a flower blooming toward the sun, a burst of excitement and adrenaline in her chest when he kisses her. His lips are warm and a little chapped from the winter cold, a hint that he’s never lived in a place like this. He smells like summer, even through the damp wool of his greatcoat under her clutching fingers. She thinks of that boy pilot she met at the beginning of the war, barely older than she had been, kissing him goodbye, and knows in the darkest corner of her heart she’ll never see this one again, either.

“I’m not going to die,” he promises her, and his eyes gleam with mirth. “So that’s not a very good reason, really.”

“Everyone dies,” she tells him, even God, who is inattentive and absent to his warring children, as if he were ever there to stop them from killing each other before. She releases her grip on his coat, but Hikaru caresses the curve of her ear and steals another kiss from her, gentle and fast this time. Polina isn’t prudent enough to be offended by it. She’s kissed boys and men alike before she grew up and became a woman, but this feels different. It’s desperate, like reaching out through the dark and unexpectedly finding what she’s been looking for since the war started. When Hikaru touches his broad thumb to her lips and squeezes her waist, she knows he’s been looking, too.

“I’m never going to see you again,” she repeats, but not even she really believes it. Hikaru only laughs and straightens her scarf for her, and though she expects him to walk her home, he only escorts her back to her friends and disappears into the crowd, enigmatic and familiar at the same time.

*

For nearly three weeks, Polina dreams of nothing but blissful darkness, the splash of stars in the sky and the moon bright over the boarding school she all but grew up in. She dreams of her youngest years, too young to entirely understand why her papa left her at Glenholme, but her memory seems to have erased the bad times, the loneliest times when she felt totally isolated, even when she couldn’t even get a moment to herself outside the shower and felt like she’d scream for her desire to just be alone on the planet for just _one minute._ She dreams of her papa’s warm, spicy cologne and his broad arms spinning her in circles in the garden when she ran to meet him on his rare visits. Some nights, she dreams of late night Christmas mass with scattered candles around the chapel, pudding the next afternoon and the smell of the soap they used to wash the sheets, the lilac that bloomed under her window in the late spring when she threw open her window to air out her room and the reek of wet wool that lingered in all the classrooms all winter.

She tells herself when she dresses for work every morning, combing through her curls and staring at the dirty mirror in the bathroom, that she’s only thinking of these things because of the season, dreary and wet and cold, because she misses her papa and the careless days from before the war. Never does she allow herself to think that it’s the pilot with the dark eyes and the warm lips, kissing her in the mid-January night in his heavy coat, that’s changed things for her. Not even once, except the fleeting thought of him that follows every plane that flies over on descent to the airfield, or the roar of a motorbike through the manor’s gates.

It’s only half ten when she receives the memo slip requesting her presence in Mr. Spock’s office, which sends her into a tailspin of nerves until she actually arrives and forces herself to calm down and knock on his door. His cool “Enter” is enough to set her on edge again, but when Polina pushes open the door and stares directly at Hikaru Sulu, the same pilot she kissed and swore she’d never see again, in flesh and blood and his uniform and windswept hair. He’s alive, and when he smiles at her with immediate recognition, she knows that he’s thinking the same thing that she is.

“Flight Lieutenant Sulu is the pilot who took these photographs, Miss Chekova,” Spock begins abruptly, oblivious to the silent exchange going on between them, and slides the film and developed pictures with it across his desk to her.

Ever since Polina took the job here she’s been a little intimidated by Spock, who is famous and brilliant for his mathematical work, and the man she answers to most often for her decryption work, though she’s always had the impression that he’d rather be left alone to his own work. She shakes off the reverie and looks up at Hikaru with a flash of a smile before she sits down on the other side of the desk and examines the photographs.

“I do not believe that you or I are often brought into the analysis portions of data collection, but this particular set of photographs appears to illustrate something that we have made note of in both yours and my recent decryptions, though I am not as familiar with yours as you might be. They were sent to me for confirmation, Flight Lieutenant Sulu here will be assisting us from his knowledge of the area, and we will attempt to piece together the entire story of the geography here before returning it with a full report.” Spock doesn’t even look up from his notebook, where he seems to be meticulously recording the date, time, and both Polina and Hikaru’s full names, though she’s not entirely certain he’s ever actually indicated that he knows hers.

The three of them spend a solid hour and a half working out the details of her recent work, and though Polina doesn’t remember everything, Spock’s flawless memory for his own work often covers for her lack thereof. While Spock keeps perfect notations of the relevant aspects of their discussion, Polina steals looks over at Hikaru, who smiles warmly at her every time, as if he’s waiting for her to break the monotony of their work and say anything at all about a kiss she knows he hasn’t forgotten any more than she has. When the bells from town start ringing, Spock sets down his pen and nods to both of them.

“We will resume after lunch,” he announces, and both of them stand simultaneously, their chairs scraping against the floor.

Hikaru defers to her at the door, and Polina steps through before him, turning around and snapping her mouth closed again while Hikaru shuts the door behind him. There’s a few seconds where neither of them say anything, but then she smiles and his face relaxes.

“I’m still alive,” he tells her, voicing their thoughts from before. “And I’m right here, and so are you.”

“Well,” she muses with a faint smile. “I was wrong, then. I’m sure there won’t be a next time, though.”

Hikaru hesitates, freezing in place before he looks around and beckons her away from the door to Spock’s office. It’s raining, and too cold for them to go outside, so Polina stares out the window at the streams of water sliding down the windows.

“There can be a next time,” he tells her quietly, saluting when another officer brushes past, but he turns back toward her immediately, his eyes earnest when she meets them again. “We’ve both got Sundays off, unless I’m sent down to the continent. I can come up here. We can spend the day together. Go for a walk.”

Polina has been asked onto outings with boys before, but where she’s always laughed and lightly brushed it off before, she blushes and looks away now, actually considering it seriously. “It’s a long way for you,” she protests instead, and it makes him honestly laugh, which Polina decides he should do more often, with his eyes crinkling in the corners and his shoulders shaking, just short of making enough noise to be noticed.

“I’ve come a lot farther. Let me come up here, at least this week. I don’t really know my way around up here, and—and I know you don’t either, before we get into that, so—”

“I do,” she corrects him with a smile, and she knows she’s probably ridiculously besotted, something that should pass in a few days, but it’s been weeks and whatever compelled her to follow him out into the night in January is still there, clouding her judgment. “I’m visiting my papa on this Sunday,” she finally admits when her head is clear enough to remember. “Next Sunday.”

“Next Sunday it is,” he grins, so broadly that her heart aches a little from it. It’s no time to be so happy, but her stomach flips, and she nods, sure she’ll hardly be able to focus on anything until then, not even her papa’s warmth and familiar cologne.

*

“I need a favor,” Hikaru calls across the hangar, trying his best to look convincing when he crouches down next to his Spitfire, but all he can see is a pair of boots and the legs stuffed into them before Scotty rolls himself out from underneath with his eyebrows raised high. He’s had two days to sit on his proposal, and if he’s going to make it up to Bletchley in a week, there’s one man he’s got to talk to—the man who is more responsible for keeping Hikaru alive than any weaponry mounted on the Spitfire.

“I suppose you think I’ve got all the time in the world to cater to your favors, Sulu?” Scotty rolls over and up to his feet, straightening his suspenders and tapping a wrench against his thigh. Finally, he softens into a grin and his stance loosens. “What’s it going to be this time?”

“I’ve got a date on Sunday,” he tells him, a little too proudly, and when Scotty’s expression drops into sarcastic disbelief, Hikaru’s mood is impervious to it, however apprehensive he is that he might not get what he needs. Sundays belong to him, the one day he knows she has free, and the one day he can make this work when he’s not out flying a mission.

“I don’t believe it,” Scotty tells him, picking up his toolbox. “Can’t think why anyone might want to go on a date with you, a charming hero of Britain. Not one of those dumb girls hanging around, mooning over the others, is it?”

“She’s up in Bletchley,” he protests, finally a little put out by Scotty’s skepticism. Not that he’s one to be teasing _him_ about girls. Everyone knows there’s a girl in dispatch that he fancies. Hikaru has had the distinct honor of knowing she’s just as interested in him. He came in late from Manston back in June and found them arguing over an engine, and though Scotty insists she’s not interested, Hikaru saw enough amusement glinting in her green eyes that evening to know that Gaila’s just waiting for him to ask her out. Whether or not Scotty ever gets around to it is yet to be seen. “I need to know if I can get up there or not.”

“Bletchley, eh?” There’s a long pause, which Hikaru assumes is just for effect, before Scotty sighs and waves for him to follow along with him. “Tell me about this date.”

Hikaru rolls his eyes. “Can you do it or not?”

“Humor me, Hikaru,” he tells him, ducking under another plane on his way to the far side of the field. “Didn’t take you for much of a lady killer when you got here.”

“That’s because I’m _not_ ,” he protests, jogging after him and pausing when Scotty finds his next plane and turns around. When Scotty’s gaze doesn’t falter, and he’s still staring at him expectantly, Hikaru sighs and pushes his fingers through his hair. There isn’t really a good way to quantify this date, though Polina _is_ pretty, and she _has_ been a near-constant distraction lately, but the kind of thing that makes him want to be around her has nothing to do with the way he describes her, pushing out the words in a frustrated huff. “She’s slight, chestnut hair, curls, does it really matter what she’s like?”

“Not really,” Scotty grins, ducking down beneath the plane so his voice echoes out from below. “But I still got you to say it, so at least I know that you _do_ really want to see her.”

“That’s why I came here,” Hikaru groans in exasperation, crouching down again. “Are you, or are you not—”

“You’ll get there, lad,” comes the answer, and it takes him a few seconds to fully register his relief and his expression to drop into a grin. “I’ll see that you get there.”

*

She expects it to be much more awkward than it really is when they agree to go for a walk, barely sure they’ll have enough to talk about. She stares at countryside that feels like another world entirely from the one they inhabit the rest of the week, where men are dying and he photographs impossible defenses and she decrypts the secrets of an empire determined to break their spirits and annihilate them. Polina doesn’t dwell long on it, because Hikaru is staring up at the sky with a similarly pensive expression and his mouth half open.

“My papa told me that flies come in when you do that,” she laughs, and he looks down at her again, a little surprised, his hair sticking up oddly.

“I’m the worst at this,” he grins, shaking his head, and she knows that he doesn’t think that at all. “I was looking forward to this, and I can’t even have a conversation with you if I haven’t had a drink.”

Polina takes his hand and squeezes and it makes him blush even though they’re both wearing gloves. “It’s nice here. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that the war is going on when it looks…”

He gestures with his hands at the landscape to indicate that he knows what she means. Peaceful, she means, and so does he. Quiet.

“California was beautiful. Warm, too,” he says, and when he closes his eyes, transported somewhere she knows he hasn’t seen in years, but stays around him like cloying perfume; a shadow he’ll never shake. “I know it’s not like here, it’s too far for any bombers right now, but I think it’s better that way. I feel like if I ever went back, it’d all be ruined forever, you know?”

She thinks that her mother said something like that once to her father, that she would never be able to go back to Russia to see the fallout and the ruin left behind when everything changed, but that was the revolution, before Polina was even born, and this is a different time than the one her parents escaped from. This is the direct heir to it, and there’s no escaping war—it followed them here. It will follow to America one day, and Polina decides that she can’t stand the thought that Hikaru might one day go home and find that everything changed while he was a world away. She keeps the thoughts to herself and squeezes his hand again, allowing her footsteps to slow when his do, far enough from town that no one can see them here.

“I don’t really get homesick very often, except when I think about it,” he laughs, the sound too weighted with bitterness to be sincere.

“Well, then tell me about it and we’ll have something to talk about,” she suggests, pulling on his hand, and his eyes open for her, clear and surprised, as if she’s not the one he expected to see. The sun is dipping lower in the sky. They’ll have to go back now, and tomorrow she will be back in the station, working out translations and decryptions with Spock, the same things that have been beating around her head all the time, awake and asleep. She dreams of fire still, but with the mounting tension from the Americans joining the war, she dreams of the whirring bombes, sheets of paper scribbled with her cursive and Spock’s precise, uniform letters together. When Hikaru follows after her, the afternoon sun bright and warm in his hair, she wonders what he dreams of; if it’s California or his family, or whatever things he’s seen flying over France, the same things that elude and ambush her every day, only real.

“I tell everyone I’m from San Francisco, but I grew up outside the city,” Hikaru tells her. “The countryside out there looks a lot different here, but I learned how to fly using the old biplane Papa bought after the war—the other one,” he clarifies and pushes on when she hums to indicate she’s listening, but he’s smiling now, just this side of a real laugh. “It was a little beat up, the engine stalled if you left it alone for too long, but I learned pretty well. I crash landed a few times, and Ma thought I was dead. She always yelled at me, every time.”

“You’re making it hard for me to have much faith that I might have been wrong, and you’re going to crash one day,” she teases, but it’s just a joke that feels good to tell, like she can laugh at death when he’s right there in front of her; all the evidence she needs that he’s good enough to survive as long as skill takes him.

“Let me finish,” he tells her, and he’s laughing now. “Anyway, that was when I decided I was going to fly planes. We moved to the city when I was fifteen so Papa could get work.” He goes quiet for a few, long seconds and she knows there’s something he’s leaving out. “My sisters loved it and Ma hated it, and I always had my eyes on the sky. I enlisted to fly in the Air Corps when I was eighteen, and then…”

Hikaru trails off, as if it’s all self-evident from there, though it really isn’t, and when Polina pauses to look over at him with her eyebrows up, it’s the first time she’s pushed him at all. Of course there’s more to this than just that, it’s not like he could have had an easy time of things since joining, even if he thinks he can get by without talking about them.

“And then what? It is not as though you were forced to join the war.” The words are a little bitter, a little grateful, because she would have never chosen this. She would have chosen to run. Maybe he was running, too, from something that still caught up with him.

His expression isn’t as surprised as she imagined it would be, but he nods and he keeps his eyes on hers. “The war started, and that was bad enough, people talked about it going either way, we could stay out, or we could go in. When the Germans started bombing, I knew I couldn’t sit it out.” He shrugs, just like that, like giving it up was something he just did because it was right. When he adjusts his coat to account for the fast falling twilight and the dropping temperatures, Polina shivers and looks down the road toward the town and the faint flicker as streetlamps turn on.

“And now you’re here.”

“And now I’m here,” he smiles, tugging off his gloves to cup his cheek with his warm palm, only the tips of his fingers chilled from the piercing cold of the season. “Don’t look at me like that, Polina. I chose this, and I haven’t regretted it even once, no matter how much I miss home.”

“You should have never had to come here,” she tells him in a rush, and she shakes her head to clear out her thoughts before she speaks again. “I’m glad you did, I would have never met you, but this isn’t how it should have been.”

“How else should it have been?” he asks, and the lamp a few feet away clicks on. “The war came, and we’d have never met if I hadn’t done what I did when it did.”

She cracks a weak smile, unsure how to feel about the idea that there’s something worthwhile in all of this, something that’s allowed him to keep his optimism about the world. “You can’t think I’m worth…” Polina shakes her head and decides that way lays madness. She’s not worth the kind of death that’s happened, and he doesn’t think so, anyway.

“Bad things happen, Polina,” he murmurs, and his cold fingertips brush over her colder ears, into her hair and drawing her closer. “It doesn’t mean good things can’t grow out of it.”

“We’ve barely met,” she tells him, looking for whatever excuse she can find to put this off, to hold back the cresting wave in her chest; the same thing she knows he’s feeling, judging by the smile in his eyes. She doesn’t believe in this kind of thing, these intangible, unquantifiable things that comprise the aspects of spiritual faith that she doesn’t have, but he seems to in ways she’ll never understand. “There’s so much that I don’t know.”

“Give it time,” he suggests brightly, and his kiss is a persistent flame in the bottom of her stomach, keeping her warm and certain. She leaves her lips parted and wants to ask him if he plans to let her decide whether they’ll be going out again, but she doesn’t feel much like playing coy when she’ll just say yes in the end.

“All right,” she sighs instead, and the sound turns to a laugh when he pulls her closer with a hand on her waist, and she can feel his heat coming off in waves, through both their coats. He’s right, of course, that even good things can come. She’s grown into herself, blossomed into a woman since the beginning of the war. “A little time,” she promises, and knows it will be more than just a little, more than just another Sunday walk, especially when Hikaru bends forward and kisses her again, holds her there long after the five o’clock bells.

*

It’s long past five when Spock sets down his pen and announces that it’s late enough that he will have to walk her back to her flat, even though Polina protests a little more vehemently than is entirely polite. She loses the argument, of course, when Spock levels a skeptical look at her when she explains that she’s walked home in the dark before, plenty of times, and nothing has ever happened to her.

“It would be safer, and I would appreciate the company on my own return home.” His face is sincere and Polina knows she can trust him, but it’s the deeper level of intensity in his eyes that indicates that he has something more he wants to say to her that sends her after her coat and scarf and out the door with him.

They’re out of sight of the gates when she looks up at him, his breath fogging the air in front of him in small, perfectly timed puffs and the steam on his glasses clearing in the cold air and steady drizzle.

“Mr. Spock,” she begins, and he meets her eyes, looking surprised, as if he didn’t expect to see anyone with him at all. “You wanted to talk to me.”

“I did,” he says, unperturbed by her ability to read him, to push the issue because she’s impatient and nervous, and then he looks ahead at the road without saying anything more for another few moments, until they’re past the small grove of trees, the darkest shadows. “Your work is quite satisfactory.”

Polina expects the worst of this conversation, but Spock just hums, as if that’s all he wanted to say and it’s _not_. Walking her home is too much an inconvenience for him to say something he could have told her before she left, but Spock looks down at her again through his wide lenses and hums again, thoughtfully.

“Your efficiency is positively correlated with your mood,” he explains, and Polina’s eyebrows jump.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your mood,” he repeats, and when he slows to a stop, she stops too. “Your focus at work has improved, you seem much more engaged with our colleagues, you seem… happier.”

“I’m not sure I can explain—”

“Miss Chekova,” he tells her gently, and his voice is kind enough for her to realize that he’s not really meaning to comment on her work, though she’s sure he wouldn’t exaggerate his feelings on the matter at all. Spock is too straightforward, though she knows very little about his personal life, only the things whispered around him, things that can only be half true.

He escaped Germany only a few years before, as German aggression escalated and he must have realized that war would come, that there were things he would have to preserve through escape. Polina expects that his sacrifice, no matter how noble, has been met with suspicion. Some men are self-evident in the way they act, revealing their character simply by way of being around them, of meeting them and seeing them and learning to know them, and that’s not enough for everyone, but it’s enough for most people, and it’s enough for her. Spock is among their number; has never said a word about himself, nothing of his history or his motivations and nothing of the things that must bother him the most. She lowers her eyes from his.

“I would like only to express my well-wishes and approval for whatever it is that has come to fruition between you and Flight Lieutenant Sulu.” She opens her mouth to hastily explain there’s nothing like that, but Spock continues before she can even think to form the first word. “That is all I wish to discuss on the matter, Miss Chekova. You need not worry yourself with hidden implications of my words.”

“You’re lonely,” she tells him, looking up very suddenly and seeing his eyes, and it’s true, she can see it so clearly, so suddenly, and wonders why it never occurred to her before. He’s a quiet man, a singular one who spends his time working, and she assumed only that he might be so lost in his intellectual pursuits that the needs of mere mortals might be lost on him.

“Yes,” he says and starts walking again, back to the even puffs and minute clouds that indicate they’re alive, still alive, despite the cold, the rain, the war. Her heart twists that there is such a man who can live in such a time, not so different than how she had been, and nobly failing to be jealous as she knows she would be.

“There are so many people, I’m sure they would be happy to spend time—”

“Yes,” he agrees, sounding as if he’s choosing his words carefully before he continues, “but how many of them would I care to make an acquaintance with? There are other factors that mark me unsuitable company for anyone who wishes to retain a favorable reputation.” Other factors, she thinks, that are not like status as a genius mathematician, but as a traitorous refugee from his home country. Heroic, brave, certainly, but still different. Polina wonders if he’s fixated on her because he sees her as much of the same, or Hikaru, or both of them with the last few weeks spent together as often as possible, the rest of the world an abstract, distant notion to both of them in those moments.

“I see,” she says, and thinks of loneliness in a crowd of people, how much more lonely that might be.

“We’re scheduled to have a group of Americans joining us in our work soon,” he muses aloud without transition, but Polina is starting to suspect there was more to his urge to walk her home anyway. “I do not want you to think that we will have any lack of work for you, however.”

“I wouldn’t think of that,” she answers, though the thought had flashed across her mind, just before she put it aside immediately. There’s always enough work; always enough that she’s sure they’ll never get it done, they’ll never do it all right.

“Lieutenant General Pike will be accompanied by his aide-de-camp and a team of other analysts. There will be others, of course, but they will be working with our team directly. I will put you in correspondence with Major Kirk, who will need to be made aware of our full situation. I trust you will be capable of providing sufficient information for the major to brief General Pike?”

Polina is sure now more than before that she’s missing something important—that’s not quite her full position, but Spock seems to be addressing her as if there’s something she should know that she doesn’t, as if she’s just not been paying full attention. “Yes, sir,” she pushes out in a single puff of breath.

Then Spock comes short of her door and nods to her, clasping his hands behind his back. “I thank you for the company home, Miss Chekova,” he tells her in his clipped, clean accent, absent of the shyness she might have expected from anyone else who confessed crippling loneliness to her.

“Good night,” she says, pulling her keys from her coat pocket and watching him turn, to leave down the street with his straight, dignified stance.

Spock pauses one last time, turning over his shoulder with his lips parted and his eyes wide, like someone who’s forgotten something important. “I have been looking for an assistant, and have decided to extend the offer to you before any of the other possible candidates.”

The idea of it is so surprising that Polina doesn’t know what to say for a long time, but she nods while everything else he’s said falls into place, and he nods back to her solemnly.

“Very well. Good night, Miss Chekova,” he says, and she murmurs in kind, watching him leave without another interruption, and clings to her keys.

*

Spring is starting to break through the winter chill, cold nights and warmer days and the slow creep of green. Polina meets Hikaru outside the gates and notes immediately that he’s traded his heavy coat for a lighter jacket. It’s still cool enough that she needs one, but warm enough that she can pretend that it’s late enough in the season that she won’t need one at all. Hikaru grins easily at her, looks down at her worn shoes and the skirt she’s neatly mended, in as straight a stitch as she can manage for someone whose calculations are always precise, but Polina’s hands aren’t steady enough to mimic that in practical things like mending and cooking. Polina is always begging to trade her food rations for enough cloth rations to make a new skirt, but there’s just never enough except to make this one acceptable for the nicer occasions; when she goes to church with her papa, when she goes to dances like the one she met Hikaru at, and now for her visits with him, whenever he can spare the trip up to see her.

“Feels like the first time I’ve seen the sun in two weeks,” Hikaru remarks and looks as if he thinks he's very clever. Polina rolls her eyes, striding past him until he grabs her wrist and spins her around toward his chest, pulling a laugh out from deep in her chest when he holds her close by the waist.

“Someone’s going to see us like this,” she tells him, failing at a serious attempt to be stern and bursting into a fresh burst of laughter, giving up on shame to cup his cheeks with his hands and kiss him fiercely, pushing her laugh into his mouth. Hikaru allows her that, swings her around and then she lands again, corporeal and still lightheaded and giddy. She doesn’t feel immortal like this, but it sometimes feels like a temporary cloud of invulnerability hanging around them when they can be like this, the way two lovers ought to be, where nothing can hurt them.

“Let them see,” he laughs finally, and she steadies herself, lets him lead her away from the gates. “I missed you.”

“You would miss me less if you sent me messages telling me how you are,” she teases, though she’s mostly serious. She knows that he flies his missions with some regularity, and he’s always in Spock’s office afterward for the three of them to pore over the photographs together. Sometimes, he’s all professionalism and she knows that he’s seen _something_ , just the way that she goes quiet when something comes through the channels, when she finishes a decryption and translation and _knows_ things, like some twisted, dark oracle unable to prevent the worst.

Other times, the times she knows he’s put up his walls or he’s just managed to shake off the deep-seated fears that nothing will ever be okay, they touch discreetly under the table; brushed fingers, her bare toes sneaking up his clothed calf while he keeps a straight face and explains the results of his mission to Spock. They’re still waiting on the Americans Spock mentioned to come, but that’s nothing new. It feels like they’re always waiting for them, knowing they’ll come when they get around to it. Polina’s given up on waiting and just throws herself into her work, living for days like this, when there’s something else to focus on for a little while.

“I’d get here before the message would, doll,” he grins more and stumbles over a dip in the road, silent for a long time before he pulls her back toward him and says, “My mother would be horrified if she could see me right now.”

Polina hums and looks up at him, but then his smile is catching, because she looks away grinning so much that her cheeks hurt a little from it. “Something like that. I’d be sent to a convent.”

“Good thing our parents don’t run our lives,” he says and she thinks that maybe that’s straying a little close to a sore truth for Hikaru, but his cheer doesn’t seem diminished at all. “I don’t think the convent suits you, anyway.”

“Neither do I.” She turns toward him and leans against his shoulder, their pace falling out of step for only just a moment before it synchs again. “Papa wouldn’t want that for me, anyway.”

“I wonder what my father would think of me,” he muses aloud after a few beats.

“You don’t talk about them very often,” she says, and the look he gives her is all masked surprise bleeding through for as hard as he tries to hide it from her. Maybe she knows him well enough to see it now, maybe it works for someone else, but he smiles and bumps his shoulder against hers.

“You don’t talk about your family very much, either,” he says, and she meets his eyes, unafraid.

“My mother died of tuberculosis when I was five,” she explains, closing her eyes and summoning the blurred memory of her face, the last cold night Polina was allowed to see her rushing back to her. She brushes off a shiver and tells herself it’s only because a cloud in front of the sun. “They came from Russia before I was born, before the revolutionaries took over. My father had an old friend here, and so they escaped and I was born here.” She smiles a little then. “I was the only thing they brought from Russia with them. Mama talked about it like you talk about America.”

“I don’t talk about it that much, do I?” Hikaru looks uncomfortable with the thought.

“Not that much,” she says serenely and he looks away to consider that, what it really might mean to be homesick without a way to change the consequences of his choices. “I don’t know she would have ever gone back if she could have, but it was always better in Russia. When I was younger, maybe ten, I remember demanding for Papa to tell me how Russia could have ever been better than it was here, and he spent hours telling me about somewhere I’d never seen before.” Polina looks at him, and Hikaru stares back like he wants to kiss her and change the subject, but he only does the former, lingering long enough for her to whisper the rest against his mouth; “I’ve never been further from home than I am right now, and it’s a whole other world.”

“Don’t say that,” he laughs against her mouth. “It makes it sound like where we are now is something that could disappear in a second.” It could, they both know it without him saying it, but she turns her head and kisses him hard. Even if this is the last second they have, with everything coming to life around them, even if the world is nothing the way she knows it to be, she thinks that this, at least, is right.

“I know it’s worse for you,” she says, and he shakes his head, pulling away and leading her along the walk a little while longer.

“That’s not what I meant,” he tells her and circles the pad of his thumb familiarly over the back of her hand. “I mean that… it’s sad when you say it like that. I think about things, how they were, and how they are.” She stares at him expectantly, and Hikaru lowers his head, pushing out a laugh that she can’t imagine is particularly genuine, not with their topic.

“You don’t need to say—”

“My father was the one who died,” he says, and she snaps her mouth shut to listen, something her father might have said was impossible before the war, when Polina found things to be quiet about. Similarly, she thinks when Hikaru looks at her intently, as if measuring his faith in her before speaking any more. “There was an industrial accident. He died a year after we moved to San Francisco.”

“You don’t need to tell me these things,” she interrupts, but he shakes his head and slows when they’re going to come into town too soon to finish the conversation.

“I’m not ashamed of anything. Ma was the heart of our family, we all loved her so much, but Papa…” Hikaru struggles for the words for a moment, she can see it in his eyes. “Papa was the spirit. He wanted me to fly, and Ma wanted me to take up a trade so I could get married and have children and be happy.” He comes back down from the sky, from the birds that returned despite the war to announce the coming of spring, growing over manmade ruin easy as anything, as if it was always meant to do just that. “When I said I was joining the Army, Ma was worried, and my sisters were excited, but it was a good thing for us. I stayed up… God,” he laughs and the sunlight bursts on his hair when he shakes his head. “I stayed up all night a few times with my sisters, because they were talking about opening the Officer Candidate School, and I was dreaming about getting a commission.”

Polina knows what’s coming now, the end result without the missing pieces, but she doesn’t stop him when he breathes out of his nose and beckons her behind the public house at the edge of the town, where an open field is still overgrown and awaiting a plow that might not come this year because the field could be bombed; because the man who should be operating it is off to war.

“I had a good time in the Army, until we heard about the bombings. I remember thinking, this is it. We’re going to go over and fix things right, because the Germans had gone way over the line and we were just _taking_ it.” He looks down at her, and Polina thinks of the early days of the Blitz, before she was old enough to join the war effort, what it was like for her and what it must have been like to be safe, thousands of miles away, and hearing of it, wanting to help.

“So you came,” she says quietly, trying to work out the conundrum that is Hikaru Sulu, and he laughs, something like before, when he first came to get her.

“It wasn’t as easy as it sounds.” His voice is decidedly serious, but his forehead is wrinkled only with the memory of it. “I waited what felt like forever for things to go through. I had to be discharged from the Army, though my commanding officer was sympathetic. I was given a broken arm on paper and sent home. A week later, I was negotiating the terms for me to join the RAF and fight with the others that were going from America. We were all naturalized together, flew in a squadron together, and most of them…”

“You really don’t need to tell me these things,” she says firmly, but he squeezes her hand until she knows she doesn’t have the heart to do that, to break away when he needs her to hear this.

“Most of their families were proud of them, and I didn’t hear from mine until after the Japanese attacked. I got three pieces of bad news in…” Hikaru closes his eyes to think. “Probably two weeks. Eagle squadron was going to fight the Japanese, I was being investigated to establish my loyalty, as if giving up my citizenship wasn’t enough, you know?” Polina decides not to say the logically obvious, that anyone paranoid enough might think only that he was willing to give something away.

“And then I got a letter from my family,” he presses on, and now she’s sure that the show of endurance isn’t to impress her, but just to get it all out. She wonders, of all the men he’s met since coming here, how many have heard his story, and her stomach twists anyway.

“Hikaru,” she says abruptly, and he looks up at her, his eyes widening when she surges forward and kisses him, a mess of clumsy hands and lips meshing together. “It’s okay,” she pants out against his lips, flushing and pushing down a soft laugh. It’s not funny, but his expression is, as if he’s just remembered that the sun is still out, it’s spring, and they’ve made it this far.

“Do you really think so?” he asks, and though Polina is hardly the optimist he should be asking that question, she nods and tugs him down by his jacket, back into a warmer kiss, reminding him of the fluidity of their joints like waking sleepers from a long night.

“I really think so,” she swears, and it’s true for the first time when the words come out of her mouth like the promise he made to her, that he wouldn’t die. He’s not allowed now, not when she’s fallen in love with him without paying attention, the most uneventful fall that anyone has ever had; just meeting him and then falling straight into place.

“Are you going to marry me after the war?” he asks with a laugh that says he doesn’t believe it for a minute if she says yes, but she does, not sure if it’s a joke or not. She’ll know later, when it’s time. That’s not now, though, and so he just rests his hands on her hips and holds her against him one more time, mouthing into her hair. Polina doesn’t know what he’s saying, but she can guess, and so she holds onto him and whispers the words he can’t hear back to him, to no one at all. She knows it certain as the blue sky and the new, vibrant grass beneath her feet, so confident that it terrifies her more than a little, the vertigo that comes after the fall he’s feeling as acutely as she is.

*

The sun trickles through the foliage of the oak tree they’re sprawled under, speckling across their skin. Hikaru rolls onto his side and looks at her, the shadow and light in her coiled hair, pooled and scattered across the ground, and touches her cheek. They’ve settled well into this routine, nearly forgetting the war, even the rest of the week when it’s inescapable. He supposes she must be something like him, carrying a little part of that war around with him and hating every second of the constant aftertaste in the back of his mouth when he does anything he shouldn’t be enjoying so much. He can’t even think of the possibility of being in love with her when he can’t think straight at all, shouldn’t be flying a plane when he thinks about her here, the thing he looks forward to, his only reprieve from the war.

“There’s a group of Americans coming this week,” she tells him without opening her eyes until she hears his slow intake of breath, green eyes shining brighter under the sun. “Finally.”

Hikaru hums, and he knows that he says something in response, but he forgets it immediately, while he’s even still saying it to her. She’s lovely and she’s his, her shoes abandoned by the base of the tree with his after they stripped them off to feel the soft grass beneath their feet.

“Are you going to be able to work with them?” she asks sensibly, and though Hikaru laughs, he’s not really sure. Some things go deeper than he knows, especially the attacks that are so fresh on every American’s mind except Hikaru’s, but he’s not really an American anymore, except by culture and accent. Nothing else holds him there, just a family that he hears from intermittently, if ever, and only his sisters. His mother, Tomiko wrote last time, hadn’t entirely forgiven him for leaving them, even though they all know it’s not fair to hold that against him.

“I hope so,” he says when he sobers again, and Polina looks at him with a single, lifted eyebrow and a skeptical expression that might put Spock’s to shame, and Hikaru expects that he’s becoming a hell of an expert on the man’s expressions. “I don’t know how they’ll react, you know? If I’d stayed, I’d have been thrown out of the service, too.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Polina suggests, and Hikaru can’t think of a better time for a topic change, especially when her skirt is spilling over her thighs the way it is.

“You’re a horrible distraction,” he complains, but she just laughs and holds out her arms for him, sighing when he lays out next to her, skimming the flat of his hand down her hip, hooking behind her knee and grinning when she laughs, squirming because she’s ticklish just there.

“You’re a terrible influence,” she scolds, and laughs again when he rolls on top of her.

“I was fine lying here,” he grins, and she pinches his hip. He rubs the mark and looks down at her fondly, leaning down and brushing his lips over hers for only a second, to murmur, “You wanted to talk about work.”

“We weren’t talking about anything at all,” she protests, “I wanted to talk about something.”

Hikaru kisses her then, not so different from the times when she kisses him silent, only his eyes are closed and she’s completely relaxed under him. “It’s okay not to talk sometimes,” he tells her, and she rolls her eyes hard. He doesn’t want to admit that this is the first time he’s ever been close enough to a woman to be in a position like this with her, let alone with the suddenly not-so-dim prospect that they might take it further, to the things whispered between boys in school and shouted across barracks between soldiers. Hikaru can’t actually imagine it being like that with Polina, though, something that can be crass or crude or really _anything_ but like it is now: comfortable and relaxed and worlds away from anything cold or difficult. He doesn’t need the overly romantic gestures like his sisters gossiped about when he still lived at home, the secret aspects of a woman’s life, but when he looks at Polina with her laughing eyes daring him to do his worst, or his best to her, he doesn’t really think she’s that kind of girl, either, if such a thing is even allowed.

“I’m going to say something to you,” he says, and swallows hard, because that wasn’t what he wanted to say when he moved closer to her. “And whatever we do afterward, because I want to do things afterward, but whatever, that’s not. That’s because I mean these things, not that I mean these things because I want to do these things.”

“We call it making love,” she tells him, and he laughs because of course she would be casual about this, entirely unbothered by his awkwardness as she reaches between them to unbutton the front of her blouse the way he thinks that he should be doing now.

“That’s the thing, Polina,” he tells her, resting his hands over hers. “I don’t want you to be doing this because you’re supposed to. I’m doing it because I love you, and because—”

“I love you, too,” she says and reaches for the buttons on his shirt instead, pressing the slightest kiss to his jaw. “For some time now, actually, if you feel the same way.”

“We should probably leave my shirt on,” he laughs and goes with it, stilling her hand then, too. “Are you sure—”

“I’m sure,” she insists firmly, hiking her skirt higher up onto her hips. Her hands reach for his, curling around them and pulling him forward.

There’s a moment when they stare at one another without moving, but then Polina reaches up and cups Hikaru’s cheeks and he remembers that neither of them have done this before, she’s relying on faith in him. Hikaru knows it would be belittling to tell her it’s all right, he’s the only one who needs to hear it right now anyway, and so he presses his palms into the moss on either side of her waist, bending forward and kissing her mouth open.

Polina stiffens until he brushes fingers down her sides, when she relaxes and unbuttons the front of his trousers successfully this time. “I love you,” she whispers into his mouth and Hikaru smiles then, pushes forward into her hand and holds in the softest whimper while she strokes him to hardness.

There’s not much but instinct guiding them, so Hikaru is more careful than ever when he pushes into her, one slow breath leading another until their hips are pressed together and he laughs despite himself. Polina’s eyes are still tightly shut and her breath comes in short pants. First her fingers loosen on his shirt, then her eyes open, and she laughs with him.  
“They swore it would hurt,” she says to hide that it must have hurt at least a little and Hikaru laughs again, pressing his forehead against hers and realizing for the first time that he’s holding onto her no less tightly than she’s holding him.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes and catches the mild annoyance in her expression before it fades and she strokes her thumb over his cheek in silent encouragement. He barely knows what to do now, still relying on some inherent knowledge that must come surging to the surface any time now. It doesn’t, and Hikaru isn’t really surprised, so he just rolls his hips in the same, slow way he does when stroking himself at night, when no one is supposed to be awake, but all the others are doing it just as silently. It knocks a soft cry out of him and Polina looks up at him urgently, blinking and open-mouthed with the epiphany of her own pleasure.

Belatedly, Hikaru thinks that he should reach out and touch her, skimming his hands over her blouse, one to cushion her head when the rhythm of his thrusts increases. The other skims her bare thighs and up to her wetness, and his thumb freezes over her clit when she muffles a quiet cry into his shoulder before he realizes it’s okay, it’s _good_.

“I love you,” he breathes back to her instead of assuring her it’s all right, something they both already know. Things will be okay, for one moment everything else is irrelevant and forgotten, and Hikaru remembers that it’s all right for them to hope for something more. Seconds later, he pushes deeper into her one last time and whispers another apology for the stricken look on her face when he reaches climax, mouthing against her lips and pressing his fingers against her in tight circles. Finally, when Hikaru feels like he’s poured himself out entirely, there’s nothing left but the heavy spread of exhaustion in his limbs, she squeezes her eyes closed and kisses him hard to muffle the shout accompanying her own climax.

After a few moments to catch her breath again, Polina seems to remember herself and pushes her skirt down toward her knees. Hikaru curls himself upward and reaches for the button on his trousers, but her hands are there first. Hikaru catches her eye and she lifts an eyebrow, unchanged by something that he’s _sure_ should have changed them irreversibly, but he feels no different than before. There isn’t even a need to talk, so he averts his eyes and watches her hands move, deliberate and decisive, like she means everything she does.

“You’ll be here for the meeting?” she asks finally, hands moving next to his while they pack away the remnants of her basket. When his eyes meet hers quizzically, she looks away with her cheeks a little pink. “Later this week, when the Americans arrive. I’ve already sent on the materials to the general coming—to his aide, rather.”

Hikaru snorts quietly, remembering the structure of the Army, the insufferable aides that circled the officer they served like attack dogs. He can’t really feign excitement about the newcomers. “I guess you’ve already got their names, then?” he asks and helps her to her feet, offering her underwear to her with sudden, fierce heat in his cheeks.

She takes them without a second look and drops them into the basket. “The head is Pike,” she says dismissively, but the uneasy feeling in Hikaru’s stomach goes suddenly sharp when she continues, “His aides are McCoy and Kirk. There’s a civilian linguist coming as well, but I’ve never met her.”

Hikaru says nothing to indicate the numbness spreading through his body as they walk back toward the road. He knows that she must be right, there can’t be a mistake in her memory if she recalls names as easily as that, though there must be a hundred _Kirks_ in the U.S. Army. It’s just that he knows intuitively that it’s the same Captain James Kirk that released him from service, the only one who knows that he never had a medical injury to warrant his discharge; the only man who could ruin everything with a word if he wanted.

He tells himself it’s all right, nothing’s endangered, but he really just doesn’t know.


	2. Part II

_June 1943_

Jim looks out of his window with only a shadow of a smile, less than the grin he typically tries to wear. Anyone looking at him now might think that he’s enjoying the countryside rather than thinking about it, about a year and a half since they should have actually arrived. A year and a half that could have gone different, he thinks. He’s got the numbers in the small book in his rucksack to keep track of the casualties, but here he’s in a formal uniform, flanking the right of Lieutenant General Pike and sneaking glances at Captain Eleanor McCoy, who’s been looking as if she wants the throw herself out of the jeep and retch into the pretty hedgerow for the last fifteen miles. It’s not much of a difference from when they flew over, when she spent most of their flight clinging to her seat, as if that might somehow hold the plane together, too.

‘It’s a goddamn metal deathtrap,’ she’d hissed at Jim unhappily, but he was rubbing her back and offering a bag to be sick into, and if she meant to say anything more about the flight, it was lost after that. Jim recognizes the same green look of misery on her face now and wonders if he’ll have to be the one to tell the car to pull over for her benefit.

Nora, as she prefers to be called informally—the rest of the time it’s strictly McCoy—is about the most uptight woman he’s met in or out of the service, grumpy most days and moody the others, and even Jim isn’t sure which side he’ll encounter on a given day, though he’s determined to meet them all, until he knows all of her. She’s mouthy, smart as hell, and damn certain to make sure everyone knows it. She objected immediately to the nickname he gave her when he found out she was rumored to have brought her skeleton with her when she enlisted. Even when ‘sawbones’ became only ‘Bones’, she’s continued objecting, but started answering to it, too, if it comes from him. Jim took it to mean that she might even like him a little, that she might be as deeply entrenched in the complexities of their relationship, even though she scowls a lot. Nora never throws him out. She complains that she’s not technically allowed to do this with a superior officer, her partner in Pike’s service, or that they have other things they need to be doing all the time, but she doesn’t refuse, not even half-heartedly.

He met her when she came out of boot camp, but it was Pike who was really taken with her abilities, and took her to replace his former aide against the advice of his colleagues. She’s new to all of this, unused to the kind of life she’ll be living, and she’s sworn at both Jim and Pike for dragging her off to be a personal physician when she signed up to save the lives of the men actually _fighting._ He knows her only as well as a month or so can teach him, but he does know enough just watching her, learning her the way he learns other people, to know that she wouldn’t take well to the notion that she’s not so different from him. They’re both here to save lives, anyway, and now she’ll be more useful than she might be up to her elbows in some poor bastard’s guts. Neither of them is there because of what they’re good at, anyway, and Jim knows that. Pike is a smart man, but he’s a shrewd, prudent man who gives a damn about his men. He wants the two of them for their perspective, for their difference in opinion while they can sit on either of his shoulders and give advice. Even Jim knows the roles they’re supposed to play: she the good Samaritan, the one who will save lives, and Jim the one who will bargain with them, the one to find peace at any cost because that’s winning.

“We’re here,” Pike announces, and he climbs out of the car first, surprising the men waiting for Jim, who lopes after him and holds out a hand for Nora to take, which she ignores in favor of climbing out herself, holding her medical bag in one hand and clinging to the side of the jeep with the other. “Kirk, McCoy, the two of you are with me for our meeting.” 

Jim has Pike’s notes under his arm, one of the things he’s obligated to guard with his life, more even than Pike himself, but he catches Nora’s hand when she finally steps down onto the dirt. She looks distracted by their surroundings, and Jim’s glad. She’s usually sharp enough on details to know the nuances of his moods, and he’s more distracted than she is. He’s only reviewed this briefing half a dozen times, but the names on the sheet haven’t changed. They’re to meet with one of the head code breakers working here, a German refugee who goes only by Spock and a British civilian recruited for high analytical capacity, his assistant and a British linguist, and the RAF officer who’s been charged with delivering intelligence and other relevant information to them, Hikaru Sulu.

It isn’t even that Sulu’s name that sticks out, though Jim did catch the look of surprise on Pike’s face when he read it off to him, it’s that Jim remembers him clearly from before this report, from years ago and one of his first commands; the only man he ever discharged from his command. He’d assumed a lot of things about Sulu at the time, even when he explained his reasoning, but he’d never thought he was a coward, or that he was running away to avoid the war. He hadn’t known what had happened to him after he dropped him at the bus station in civilian clothes and a shadowed, introspective expression, weighing the consequences of what he’d done. 

When he read the name, though, he did his homework, and now he knows what’s happened to Sulu. He’s a pilot with an impeccable record, served with Eagle Squadron until they transferred out of Europe and Sulu stayed behind—no surprises there. He made one discreet call to headquarters to discuss the matter, and nothing since then, not even a mention to Pike. Jim doesn’t even think Pike would mind that he hasn’t been kept up to speed on things; he knows what comes first.

They follow Pike in a careful formation to make as few disruptions as possible to the ongoing work, but when they’re left in a small meeting room, they disperse and sit around the table, Pike at one end and Spock at the other, the five spares seating themselves at random around the rest of the table. Sure enough, there’s Sulu, wearing an officer’s uniform, and Jim manages to slip into a mask of cool professionalism. He got his wish, and Jim lets nothing through but a warm smile, though he’s sure Sulu recognizes him, if only by the second look he earns before quickly looking back at his notes. Jim scans the room again, past Nora’s busy hands. She’s examining a few sheets passed to her by the dark-skinned woman with a serious expression that dared anyone to question her when they sat down; Jim now knows her name is Nyota Uhura, and she’s a civilian. Finally, his eyes rest on Spock’s assistant, a younger woman with tightly curled hair and a small wrinkle in the center of her forehead while she concentrates on something, a calculation of hers scribbled out on a notebook in front of her, failing to look up long enough for him to wink playfully at her.

“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Spock,” Pike begins, and Jim reaches out to take his jacket from him automatically, flashing a winning smile at Nora and stifling a laugh when she rolls her eyes hard at him, turning back to her paperwork. He’ll talk to her afterward, when they’re settled into quarters, and get her impressions of the team here. 

“The pleasure is mine, General,” Spock says serenely, passing around meticulously typed notes, something his assistant has doubtlessly done for him.

Jim sits down and takes his own copies, dodging Sulu’s plain stare in favor of reading through it, as if he hasn’t seen this same information before, when it was sent by courier to meet them when they arrived. They have a predictable meeting, Sulu speaking when he needs to, to explain a few things from his photographs, while Nora reads through a few more reports she’s provided by Spock’s assistant, who introduces herself confidently as Polina. It isn’t until he’s headed for the door after Pike that Sulu finally calls out after him.

“Major,” he calls, picking up his portfolio and following him to the door with it tucked under his arm. “Congratulations on the promotion.”

“Yours, too,” Jim smiles and Sulu looks uncomfortable, but Jim doesn’t let him see how much it’s shaken _him_ , too. “I didn’t really expect to see you here.”

Sulu is quiet for a few moments, apparently speechless, and when he finally speaks again, he’s looking past Jim, toward the door. “I always meant to thank you for everything you did for me back then.”

“I guess you’re welcome,” Jim nods and holds the door open for him. He maintains the same smile until Sulu’s ahead of him and can’t see when it falls. “Don’t thank me yet,” he sighs and looks ahead to the outside, almost certain Sulu is too far out of earshot to hear.

*

“You know the pilot,” Nora tells him when her back slams against the rickety door and she swears at him in a soft drawl that feels like it climbs into his skin and creeps around, getting comfortable all the time, every second he spends around her.

“It’s a long story,” he laughs, letting her push him away from the door, but they both stumble over the rucksack dropped haphazardly across the floor and Jim steadies her with an easy grin to meet her scowl, as if he’s to blame for leaving his bag in the middle of the room, which he is. 

“Not like I don’t have forever to be well-entertained by your mysterious past with the RAF,” she counters, but his hands are the ones skimming up her sides and his lips tracing down her ear lobe and moving her closer still to him.

“He’s not from the RAF,” he tells her just before kissing her too hard to allow her the chance to ask questions. This is the other side of their relationship, the shadowed mirror of their flawless professionalism during the day when they shuck off the masks and stop pretending because there’s no need to pretend to each other.

Jim knows a lot of things about Eleanor McCoy that she’d rather no one know, though it’s unspoken that the pale line on her left ring finger is still imprinted with the memory of a ring she removed not so long before. A quick check into her history reveals that McCoy is a maiden name, that her married name is Mrs. Joshua Darnell, and that she removed her wedding rings and threw them at Mr. Darnell the same April morning that she walked into the Army recruitment office. Jim deals in knowledge, though, in understanding people, and he knew that she’s left her husband within half an hour of meeting her. Another hour and a stiff drink and he’d gotten the whole story out of her. Two days later and all her protests of disinterest later, they left work and fell into bed together, a narrow, temporary bunk to last the last few days until they were deployed.

Conversely, she knows more about him than he’s allowed anyone to ever discover, just by looking at him and calling every one of his bluffs. His father’s a hero from the last war, something he talked to Sulu about when he asked for his discharge, but not again, not until Nora scoffed after a meeting and told him she wouldn’t abide by his suicidal need to prove himself at least as worthy as George Kirk had been. _I’m not going to save your life if you’re the one too stupid to keep hold of it,_ she warned him, but Jim isn’t in any danger, anyway, so he dismissed it with a laugh and a mental note to think deeper about the twinge in his chest when she said it.

He feels the same hook and jerk when he looks at her now and reaches out to grab her hands while she slips out of her uniform, one piece at a time. “Let me,” he says and finishes with the buttons on her jacket, pushing it off her shoulders. 

Nora reaches up and pulls out the pins in her hair one by one, until her hair unfurls down her neck and Jim forgets that he’s supposed to breathe, that she’s another man’s woman until the end of the war and remembers only how much he wants her.

“Oh, Jesus,” he sighs, and laughs when he sees the small, golden cross she wears under her uniform, where no one but he’s ever seen since she joined up. She looks at him sternly. Her hands are faster than his, and she’s impatient now. 

“Careful who you say that around,” she warns, reaching behind to unhook her bra, but Jim does that for her, too, sucking a mark in her skin, just on the edge of the skin her uniform doesn’t cover. “And don’t leave a mark,” she adds with a stuttering laugh, stretching out languidly to wait for him.

“I know,” Jim laughs, undressing slowly on purpose, just to make Nora swear at him while he hangs up his uniform. When he climbs onto the bed and covers her body with his, she pinches his waist in her annoyance. 

“You take too long,” she complains and he kisses her wrinkled brow, laughing a little more at her grumpy protests. 

“Don’t make that face, Bones, it’ll stick.” 

“You’re avoiding the question.”

Damn her, he thinks as she rolls a condom down the length of his cock. She doesn’t wait for him to make up an excuse, and she’s already figured out that he’s actually not capable of lying to her when she asks a direct question. All he can do is put off answering a little longer while stroking his fingers over her folds and smiling at the shivering moan he can draw out of her. Nora isn’t one to be put off though, and even when he pushes into her with no resistance, she blinks quickly and somehow maintains the same expectant expression.

“Shit, Bones,” he laughs breathlessly, because she arches her hips up toward him and shifts in just the right way that he slips just a bit further into her. “You can’t expect me to explain anything right now, you feel so—”

She doesn’t give him the chance to finish, surging forward to snare him in a breathless kiss. He knows she’ll get the truth out of him sooner or later, if only by persistence, but she isn’t pressing the issue now, holding him close to her and rocking into every one of his thrusts, no less than an equal match for him. The sense of urgency that surrounds them all the time doesn’t fade at times like this, it’s only worse, until Nora’s fingernails dig into his back and he shouts desperately as she tightens around him, pulling his climax out of him. Then neither of them speaks, and the only sound is their gasped breaths. 

Jim rolls over onto the mattress and stares at the ceiling. “He was one of my soldiers a few years ago,” he tells her, finally giving in, but he meets her eyes and laughs at her skeptical expression. “I’ve got… a message for him.”

“That’s it?” Nora shakes her head and climbs off the bed, plainly expecting an elaboration of his confession while she dresses. When Jim doesn’t add anything, she looks up while buttoning her blouse. “You’re terrible as a man of mystery, Jim, I hope you know. You’ve got stupid secrets.”

“I know,” he laughs and rolls on his side to watch her while she steps into her skirt, dressing carefully to keep from being obviously post-coital. “I do it to rub you the wrong way, that’s all, Bones.”

“Just keep rubbing me the _right_ way and there won’t be any problems,” she retorts and smoothes her jacket while stepping into her heels. “Good night.” Just like that, so easy, no complications, and she’s gone before Jim can wish her a good night, too. 

If she’s feeling guilty, he can’t blame her, but it does nothing the quiet the irritating twitch in his chest when the door closes behind her and the room echoes empty.

*

They don’t have the time or the resources to be throwing a party for Fourth of July, but something’s got to be good for the men stationed here, so Hikaru isn’t surprised when he receives an informal invitation from the rest of them. It’s mid-afternoon when he leaves the hangar and Scotty’s ranting about the work that’s left to be done on his plane, but Hikaru laughs it off, cradling the package of film he needs to deliver to them, and leaves without another word.

When he’s on the base up there, it’s not hard to find the recreation room with a crowd of Americans around it, though he does have directions. He’s the only one there in an RAF uniform, and it attracts a few strange looks when he picks his way through the crowd, though he thinks wryly that his uniform is really only the half of it. It takes him a few minutes before he runs straight into McCoy, who’s holding a tumbler full of whiskey but manages to keep it steady when she looks up at him.

“Hey, sorry.” She waves off the apology before he can finish it, and Hikaru just smiles, thinking that he should have brought Polina to this. It wouldn’t really interest her, but it’s an excuse for an evening with her, a long walk back to the flat she’s sharing with a few other women from the station, and Hikaru isn’t picky about when and where he can be with her. He’s shaken out of his thoughts when McCoy swallows the rest of her whiskey and looks up at him seriously.

“Jim’s been looking for you,” she tells him, shakes her head like she’s forgotten something really important, and clarifies, “Major Kirk. Jim. He’s off with the general.”

Hikaru nods and looks over her head, around the room. “I’ll go find him, then. I have something I need to deliver to them anyway. Thanks, Captain.”

She nods again and he leaves her there, unable to shake off the heavy feeling in his stomach when he spots Kirk talking animatedly with Pike, who does at least look marginally amused by his antics. Hikaru is slow to approach them, but Kirk’s smile doesn’t fade when he sees him.

“Sulu!” He calls, and Hikaru quietly hands off the package of film to Pike, who nods gratefully and tucks it under his arm, gracefully dismissing himself.

“Captain McCoy said you were looking for me,” he explains and winces, because he didn’t want to insinuate that he wouldn’t have come to see Kirk anyway, which he would have done, so he adds, “And I wanted to thank you for the invitation.”

Kirk bobs his head in agreement and sets down his glass when he’s finished his beer. “Come take a walk with me. I’ll be brief, promise. We both want to get back to the party, right?”

“I was planning on spending the night,” he smiles, but when Kirk leads him out of the building, he does follow without protest. When the door clatters shut behind him, he frowns and adjusts his uniform. “I’d guess this isn’t reminiscing for the old days.”

“Not exactly,” Kirk agrees and tucks his hands behind his back, looking up at the clear sky. He looks pensive and professional, but Hikaru knows that it’s really that he’s uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to have this conversation. Just as well, Hikaru would rather this was over, too.

“I did promise to be quick about this. I’ve been briefed on your situation.” Kirk stops when they’re far enough away from the building that no one could overhear them, and Hikaru tenses all over when he recognizes this; when he turns and stares at Kirk and wonders what the hell he could know about Hikaru’s _situation_.

“Could you clarify for me, Major?” he asks instead of losing his temper and demanding an explanation.

“My superiors would like to extend an offer to you.” Kirk drags his eyes down from the sky and Hikaru feels his heart jerk in knowing. “Come back and serve with Army intelligence. They’ll restore your citizenship, you can come back home.”

“Kirk, I—”

“Off the record,” Kirk adds and his blue eyes bore into Hikaru. “This isn’t an official offer, but it’s a real one. Sulu, you could—”

Hikaru feels his heart contract, and he shakes his head, hating the rush of hope that collapses when his mind races ahead to going back to the States, seeing his family—leaving Polina, being thousands of miles away from his family, who can barely write to him now, not that it’ll be any better at all if he went back. “Kirk, I can’t.”

“Sulu, you could go home,” Kirk pushes on, as if he hasn’t heard him interrupt him at all. “It’s a damn good offer they’re giving you.”

“To _what?_ ” Hikaru snaps. “My sisters are with my mother. I’ve got responsibilities, ones that will actually help the war effort, and I’ve got my _life_ here.”

“If I were you—”

“You’re not me, though. I’m not _like_ you, Kirk. My dad wasn’t a hero, he was a farmer. I can’t have anything I have here—”

“That doesn’t matter, Sulu. You’re—”

“I’m what?” he demands sharply, and lowers his voice when someone walks past them. “I’m different because I’ve been fighting over here for two and a half years, so that makes it okay? Because I jumped all the hoops and proved I wasn’t something no one had the right to accuse me of being? Because I was willing to give up my citizenship in the first place to do what was right? And now giving it back and promising me a commission is supposed to make up for the fact that I’d have been thrown out on my ass if I’d stayed in the States, put in a prison camp with the rest of my family?” 

Kirk reaches out and grabs his arm, hauling him behind a shed and standing close enough that he won’t have to speak loudly for Hikaru to hear him clearly, his grip tight on Hikaru’s shoulder. “Sulu, I want you to listen to me, okay?” He holds him fast when he struggles, tries to push him away, offering him a soft, wry smile. “You’re damn good at what you do, and they made _mistakes_ when they did what they did to your family. That’s politicians and public opinion, that’s something else that doesn’t have to do with what we’re trying to do here and now.” 

Hikaru opens his mouth to protest and Jim shakes his head and pushes on without allowing him a moment to say anything. “This is the Army, and this is stopping a bunch of bastards from killing a hell of a lot of innocent people, which is what they’re doing a lot of, here and there and fucking everywhere. This is about fighting something evil with something that’s pretty shitty, too, but when the war’s over, we never have to touch this stuff again. You can come home then, too, and your family will be okay and we never, _ever_ have to do this again.”

There’s a long moment where they stare at one another, Hikaru breathing heavily, and then dropping his head. “Kirk,” he sighs, and shakes his head slowly, pushing away the twinge of regret in his chest, the fear that he’s taking a gamble he can’t afford to lose. “I can’t. I really can’t leave. I’ve got to stay here, now, and then after the war, and for the rest of my life.”

There’s a flash of surprise on Kirk’s face, like he didn’t expect the offer to be turned down at all, but it’s gone and he smiles again, releasing him and dusting off Hikaru’s uniform. “It can’t be the food keeping you here, Sulu,” he jokes, patting his back and looking back out to the sky, his eyes like a mirror in shadow of the bright blue, but he’s still teasing when he continues, “Unless you’ve got a girl,” and Hikaru blushes. 

“Is she pretty?” he asks, and Hikaru rolls his eyes, stepping away from the shed. 

“I’m not answering that,” he tells him firmly and finishes beating dirt out of his uniform.

“I’ll be damned. Is she worth it?” Kirk looks back down at him, surprised again without hiding it when he finds his answer in Hikaru’s expression. Then he laughs without bitterness and asks, “An offer like mine would never be able to beat out a sweetheart of yours, will it?” even when he knows the answer clear as the day around them before Hikaru shakes his head and walks away, back to the party.

*

The trip to RAF Benson is worse by car than by air, Nora decides while clinging to the handle of the car door, if only because it’s longer. At least the car is on the ground, she thinks and looks away from the rushing green outside the window. Britain’s a pretty place, like Jim told her when they first stepped foot on the ground here, but—as she told him when she was done being sick—she didn’t come here for a vacation in the countryside. And she’s not on one now, either, she thinks when they twist through yet another blink-and-miss-it town at breakneck speeds.

“Think you can slow it down?” She shouts to the driver, but she isn’t really offended when the kid doesn’t say anything back to her. She’s not totally sure she can hear _herself_ over the roar of wind and engine. 

Finally, thank _God_ , they come to a stop and Nora yanks out her ID before the guard can wave them through. The general’s flags go a long way in getting her around, she’s learned since she joined up as Pike’s aide. Jim doesn’t seem surprised by it, but he’s career Army and she’s out of here when the war is over. Most of the time she doesn’t even know how she got picked out from all the other officer recruits, but she doesn’t question it in favor of just doing the jobs he gives her to do, silently reminding herself that mouthing off to the general that she’s a _doctor_ , dammit, not an errand girl, is a fast way to get sent back to Georgia. 

When the door opens for her, with her hand still clinging to the handle, she scowls through the sun to the young RAF officer blinking back at her politely. Pike needs someone to interview the recon pilots down here, the ones other than Sulu, to dig for any other relevant information that _they_ don’t even know to put in their reports. Pike had cocked a grin at Nora when he gave her the assignment and told her that if anyone could find the little details in something, it’d be her, though she knows damn well that Jim is the charming one. 

“Captain McCoy?” The kid is still blinking at her, but she waves him off so she can step out of the car, her knees like water while she steadies herself on the door. 

“That’s me, kid,” she sighs in a soft drawl and stands straight, adjusting her bag on her hip and looking around. She doesn’t have _time_ for pleasantries like this; she’s got to be back to brief Pike by nightfall, and there’s half a squadron of pilots she has to talk to before she can leave. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as well get on with the interviews.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he chirps back to her brightly and waves for her to follow him toward one of the buildings while she rolls her eyes and follows him, waiting for her stomach to untwist itself. 

Four and a half hours later, Nora’s finished interviewing eight of the pilots and is sure she can’t handle the rest of the day unless she takes a break and collects her thoughts. Someone’s brought her a forgotten cup of tea, but she was in medical school once; she doesn’t care if it’s coffee or tea or hot or stone cold. A soft tap on the door announces the next interviewee, and she sighs, looking down at her notepad and pen and the weak tea.

“Come on in,” she sighs, and expects to see the kid she met earlier in the day, who’s been shadowing her, trying to anticipate her needs. Instead, Sulu smiles at her warmly and closes the door behind him. 

“I don’t need to interview _you_ ,” she tells him, but he grins anyway and sits in the chair opposite of hers. “I see you every week anyway.”

Sulu shrugs and pushes a small package toward her, leaning back in the chair again. “I thought you might want to eat lunch, that’s all.”

“Thanks.” She looks at the package of sandwiches and then back up at Sulu, though she’s not entirely sure what she expects to find there. Jim didn’t need to tell her much more than he had for her to put the whole thing together. Jim seems to have a thing about attracting hero-types. “You’re an impressive pilot,” she tells him instead of whatever else she might have said; that he’s a hero or a brave guy or something. 

“Thanks, Captain,” he laughs and taps his foot on the floor, waiting for something.

“Doctor,” she corrects automatically, at a loss for anything else to say and still unclear on Sulu’s motives for coming here. He’ll be back to Bletchley in a few days’ time anyway. “I’m a doctor. Are you sure there’s not anything I can do for you?”

Sulu stands up again with his smile unmoved. “I was trying to figure out what kind of people General Pike likes to keep around him, but you’re not really much like Kirk. So I thought you might be there to balance him.”

“When you figure out why the General wanted me around, I’ll be glad to hear it,” Nora says shortly. “Far as I can tell, he wants a doctor close by, or I make a good trophy.”

There’s a pause, and Sulu looks pensive before he pulls a closed envelope from his pocket and hands it to her. There’s a name she doesn’t immediately recognized scribbled across the front, and when she looks up to Sulu for explanation, he looks uncomfortable. 

“Could you give that to Spock’s assistant? Her name’s Polina. It’s just—”

Nora holds up a hand to stop him and slips it into her bag. She won’t make him explain, though she’s sure Jim would, and though she can all but hear him scolding her for missing out on an opportunity for information, she lets it go. Sulu looks relieved. “I’ll give it to her in the morning when we meet with Mr. Spock again.”

“I won’t be at Bletchley until next week,” he explains hastily, while Nora stands up again to let her little shadow know that he can send in the next pilot for interview. 

“We’ll all see you then,” she assures him and ushers him out. Nora smiles at Sulu but scowls at the guy who strides inside, all good old flyboy, and knows she’s going to have to cut _this_ one down to size before she’ll get anywhere at all with the information. 

“Show me the photographs from your most recent flyover,” she begins calmly. When she looks out the window behind him she can see Sulu heading out toward the tarmac, the wind pulling at his uniform, and when the pilot is too absorbed in talking to listen, Nora mutters a prayer for him—and for the girl he’s sending letters, always waiting for him to come back.

*

Nyota stands outside Spock’s door for five minutes before she summons the courage to knock, holding tightly to the papers in her hands. She knows there’s nothing to be concerned about, she’s working on her orders, just like every other man and woman working here, and Spock doesn’t have a reputation as a hard man. His assistant is certainly strong-willed and unafraid to speak her mind, which has been clear in the last few weeks of working together more closely. Spock is a serious man, but not a cold one. Firmly, she tells herself that there’s nothing to be afraid of and knocks on the door.

Silence greets her knock, but then there’s the sound of a throat being cleared from inside the room and the scrape of chair legs across the floor. “Enter,” Spock calls in his deliberate, even tones, and she pushes the door open with her mouth set in a determined line.

“Mr. Spock,” she says when she steps into the room with her back straight and a sheaf of papers in her hands. She doesn’t typically have much to do with delivering things to him, but there are a new string of transmissions coming through that she’s been asked to bring to Spock on her way from the intelligence hut. “Just a moment of your time.”

He looks up at her like he doesn’t quite know what to make of her, or maybe that he just hasn’t been paying enough attention to realize who she is. After a half-second, Spock’s face changes and he nods to the chair beside his desk, which is usually occupied by his assistant. 

“Miss Uhura,” he says and sets down his pen on top of a pristine pad with perfect, neat characters in black ink across the lines. “Is there business that you require me to attend to?”

She sets the papers on his desk and nods, notes how clean his accent is, and settles primly in the chair next to his desk. “A new set of reports for you to review. I’ve finished the translation for the other analysis groups, but I wanted to check my translations with you.”

His eyebrow lifts, but he only hums quietly while picking up the papers, reviewing her handwritten notes in curved loops, different from the efficient spikes of his lettering. Nyota offers the original text to him, which Spock accepts with a nod toward her. 

After a moment of comparing the two, Spock sets them down and takes a breath, which he releases very slowly when his eyes meet hers. Nyota stiffens her spine and rests her hands in her lap, feeling much like she had in school, with a stiff schoolmaster she always expected to put her down for she couldn’t be expected to succeed the way she has.

“Your translations are very accurate,” he says calmly, instead of any criticism, just his eyebrow relaxing. “Perhaps more accurate than mine might be. Your command of both languages is very adequate.”

Her cheeks warm, but Nyota keeps her head up when she stares back at him. “Thank you, sir. If you would please turn to the fourth page, there’s a word I—”

“I see it,” Spock answers solemnly, but when he marks next to her notes, Nyota realizes that they aren’t criticisms, per se, mostly suggestions, indications of things she might not have thought of. 

He doesn’t say anything else for a long time, carefully marking alongside her notes while Nyota waits patiently for him to finish. Once, when Spock pauses over one word, closing his eyes and thinking to himself, she sees his lips moving slowly, highlighted by the slowly dipping sun. When Spock sets down his pen, she looks up and straightens again, aware that she’s started to slump forward while waiting for him to finish.

“My initial assessment of your work was correct,” he says simply, pushing the papers back across the table toward her. “I look forward to working alongside you in the future.”

Nyota nods firmly and takes them back, resisting the urge to examine them. “Mr. Spock…” She looks at him, his bare desk stacked efficiently with paper, his waiting expression, and reminds herself once again that he is still just a man, her colleague in a way. There is no reason to fear a man. “I think that my lacking confidence could be improved by regular use of the language in a… kinetic capacity.”

Spock looks at her evenly, but when he looks down and shuffles the papers in front of her purposefully, she catches the flash of a faint smile curving the edge of his lips. “I would be happy to assist you as a speaking partner.” 

She tries not to feel too giddy at the offer, her heart beating a little faster to deliver the rushing adrenaline in her veins. “My evenings are free,” she says a little too quickly, and regrets it when Spock gives a soft hum. “At your leisure.”

“Evenings would be ideal,” Spock says and stands. Nyota mirrors him immediately and lets him walk her to the door politely. “Perhaps Tuesdays and Saturdays will be… most convenient for both your schedule and my own.”

There isn’t a chance for her to pause, but she nods immediately and smiles at him with all the confidence she can summon, still too stunned by the offer to think of an appropriate response beyond that when she bids him a good evening and closes the door behind herself. Just before she leaves again, Nyota looks back at the door and realizes for the first time that she recognizes the quiet serenity in Spock as something she shares with him. It’s not so surprising, or it shouldn’t be, but when she sets off back for the room where she and the other women work, she thinks that Spock must be just as lonely as she finds herself.

*

The knock on the bathroom door comes twenty minutes after the briefing was supposed to begin, the one Polina is supposed to be attending after spending three late nights working on the decryption with Spock, analyzing as they went, tinkering with the new bombes and making and striking out notes for hours, until the early summer sunrise began to tint the horizon grey. Instead, she’s clinging to the wall and retching miserably, so _sure_ she doesn’t have anything left to throw up until her stomach rolls again.

“Polina?” It’s Hikaru. She swears under her breath and takes a shaky breath. 

“I’m in here,” she calls back after a brief moment to catch her breath and forces herself to her feet. She doesn’t have time to be sick, she won’t have time until the war is over, and she curses herself for failing to take Spock up on his suggestions to go to bed if she’d known it meant that she was weakening herself for an approaching illness. 

“Do you mind if I come in?” 

“No—yes, just hold on.” She smoothes her skirt over her knees with her fingers shaking, rinses out her mouth and steels herself to open the door. Her lips are pressed together when she looks up at him and knows that her skin is pale and her eyes are lined with dark, heavy circles and her hair is disheveled from being sick. She isn’t even surprised when he reaches out and cups her cheek without even looking to see if anyone else is around, but she doesn’t have the will to remind him to be careful here, when they have work to do and anyone could see, as if they’ve been at all secretive before now. 

“You look terrible,” he notes quietly and brushes her hair back from her face. “Are you sure you don’t want Spock to give the briefing?”

“I’m fine,” she says and shakes her head. Her stomach is starting to settle, anyway. “It’s just… pressure. Stress, I’m fine. I’m feeling better now.”

Hikaru looks hesitant, but then Kirk turns the corner and looks at them with both of his eyebrows up. Polina freezes and tries to remember if Kirk knows about this, but he doesn’t look at all surprised enough for it to be news to him. Hikaru seems on edge around him, but Kirk has never been anything but polite and well-natured around her. 

“I’ll tell Spock to go ahead with the briefing,” he says and winks at them, which sends a hot blush up her neck. Hikaru only stiffens in front of her, but he only nods at Kirk, who disappears around the corner with the click of his boot heels and echoing back toward them. 

“I guess that gives us a couple minutes,” he sighs and looks guilty enough that she knows what he’s thinking, that Kirk will think they’re shirking duties for a few stolen moments when they get so few at all. “You should probably finish up what you can and get enough rest tonight.”

“I told you, I’m—”

“I know what you told me, but…” Hikaru swallows and pushes his hand through his hair, then pulls her against his chest for a rough hug, her cheek pressed against his creased, heavy uniform. “But I’m just worried you’re going to get really sick, I know you’re not really thinking about taking care of yourself.”

“Hikaru,” she grunts quietly in protest, shrugging at his arm and staring at him frowning. “I’ve kept myself alive _this_ long without you around, I think I can manage it a little longer.”

He only rolls his eyes and kisses her forehead, his fingers lingering over her cheek, the shell of her ear, and then down, behind the tight coils of her hair on her neck. “Accept that I want to take care of you sometimes, too, okay?”

Polina inhales, but she pushes another sigh out of her chest and stands on her toes to kiss him chastely. It’s better if he doesn’t know that this has been a thing, off and on, for a lot of mornings before she makes it to Spock’s office, or to her work, or to a few other briefings. “Okay. Just accept that I can take care of myself.”

“Agreed,” Hikaru sighs and squeezes her waist when he pulls away and nods back toward the room the rest of the team is meeting in. “I’ll be in to brief on the latest flyover soon.”

“See you then,” she says and starts down the hall, ignoring the twist of her stomach that indicates that she’s in for another round of sickness later in the day. It’s worrisome, and she’s almost sure she can figure out the cause of her illness, but she just can’t quite put her finger on it yet. When she reaches the end of the hall, she turns and looks back at him. “I will see you Sunday, won’t I?”

She hears the soft laugh that accompanies Hikaru’s smile when he waves to her casually and makes her heart race stupidly, ridiculously in love at the worst of times, while they’re sick, endangered, and stressed.

“Same as always,” he says and she’s still smiling when opens the door to their meeting room.

*

Polina waits for an hour before Nora finally comes back to her office, holding a clipboard in one hand. She stares at her for a few, prolonged seconds before sighing and closing the door behind her.

“I need to talk to you,” she tells her as soon as the door is firmly in place.

“I was kind of looking forward to an evening of paperwork,” Nora remarks and sets her work on the desk. “What can I do for you, Miss Polly?”

Polina gives her a dark look, presumably at the nickname, but Nora just stares back at her with an even stare. “I’ve missed two of my cycles. I thought it might be because of the rations, because of stress, but—”

Nora looks up at her from the desk and thinks that it’s to her credit that she only lifts her eyebrows, but manages not to look at all surprised. “When was your last menstrual period supposed to begin?”

“Four days ago. I didn’t want to go to the doctor in town,” she explains hurriedly. “I thought—”

“I know what you thought,” she sighs and rubs her temples slowly, then looks down at her desk, flipping slowly through her calendar. She has her suspicions, and she knows Polina must know already, which certainly explains the recent rash of tardiness on her part when arriving to morning meetings. Nora was wrong to assume that there might be a polluted spring nearby that they were pulling water from, and Jim was only marginally closer by suggesting food poisoning. His, at least, was internal, and she pushes the thought that Jim knows how to get into someone’s head easily out of her mind. It’s not a good thing to escape.

“Sulu’s only been up here twice since October, only during the week,” she remarks and looks up at Polina again, her finger landing on the calendar. “You’ve missed two cycles, and it’s the beginning of December.” She turns another page and taps the center of the table, circling her fingers around a particular week that might have been likely. “September. You’re probably due in June.”

Polina sits down in the chair across from the desk, hard enough that Nora winces when it scrapes across the wooden floor with a loud, unpleasant screech. “Oh my God,” she says and Nora waits for a few seconds before grabbing her stethoscope and draping it around her neck.

“I should probably give you an exam,” she says, softening her demeanor. If she’s honest, she’d rather perform an exam on a pregnant girl than go back into the barbaric surgery she saw at the base, where men need her help, but she needs better _everything_ to help them. This is safe, a little cathartic, even though Polina looks like she might throw up on her office floor.

“I’m going to be healthy, right?” she demands, and Nora rubs her hand over her face this time.

“You’re healthy as a horse, all right? I’m just going to have a look to see.” When Nora looks at her again this time, she frowns and crosses her arms. “You’ll want to talk to Sulu first, I guess.” When she nods, Nora strides over to her desk and scribbles something down onto a piece of paper for her. “Morning after next, oh-eight-hundred sharp or you’re going to miss the appointment. You’ll have to tell him immediately.”

“Doctor,” she begins weakly and of course the kid’s afraid, she’s barely old enough to be out of her parents’ house. Nora doesn’t know what to tell her, though, so she just gives her hand a gentle squeeze. Polina may not know it, but Nora’s heard plenty about the girls that get left behind here when soldiers are done with them. It’s happened in every goddamn war that’s ever been fought on human soil, the hearts of a thousand girls the forgotten casualties. Nora supposes that if she were in her position, if she weren’t so damn careful with the position she _is_ in, then she’d be worried about that because Jim’s probably that kind of guy while Sulu probably isn’t. She’s judged a character wrong before, though. 

Polina isn’t worried about it, not judging by her expression. Jim thinks Sulu’s a good guy, nothing’s ever indicated otherwise. Nora isn’t sure she has enough faith in Jim’s judgment of people over her own to decide whether Polina’s going to be disappointed based on that alone. 

“You know him better than anyone,” Nora assures her instead, with a gentle squeeze of her arm, and hopes that she doesn’t sound like she’s trying to convince herself as much as she’s trying to convince Polina. “Just go, just talk to him. It’s going to work out.”

Polina finally stands up, staring at the floor apprehensively, or probably at her flat belly. “Thank you,” she murmurs, and Nora crosses her arms over her chest, watching her go before she turns to write a note to Uhura, asking her to stop in on her, to make sure that everything doesn’t turn out badly, the only way Nora’s ever known things to go.

When the note is folded and tucked into her pocket, ready to be dropped off by Spock’s office, where Uhura is doubtlessly working through the evening with him, Nora pauses by the door and presses her forehead against the doorframe. It’s a foreign notion that people fall in love in times like these, something she’s sure they’re all aware of in as profound a way as can be, or that they can fall in love at any time. It’s a sharp slap for her, to remember that things can be good until they’re bad, and not even just that they’re good, but _how_ good, the excitement of being in love and together.

With a harsh sigh, Nora shakes her head and switches off the light. A baby, and the two of them just kids themselves, but they’ll probably be the happiest goddamn family together if they make it. As she avoids a deep, sticky mud hole on her way to the office where she knows she’ll find Jim, it occurs to her that it’s probably unusual that she’s not worrying about herself, whether things will turn out good or bad, not with Jim. She knows what kind of man he is, and it’s still not as bad as the kind of woman she is, but she’s never questioned things for them. They’ll survive anything that happens to them, she and Jim, because that’s the kind of nature they share. Neither of them can change the way things are. It’s just the way it is.

*

When Hikaru makes it to the gate in front of the estate, Polina is already waiting for him despite the heavy, pouring rain and that she doesn’t own an umbrella. He jogs up to her and starts to pull off his rain jacket for her, quashing the urge to scold her for forgetting that she’s been sick all week and standing in the rain can only make it worse.

“You could have waited inside,” he says when she’s within earshot, but she adjusts her wrap over her shoulders. 

“I needed to talk to you,” she pushes out while he wraps his jacket around her shoulders and leads her down the road toward town, but she pulls him into the trees beside the road and stares up at him with water dripping from her hair and onto her eyelashes. 

Hikaru’s heart contracts in his chest and swallows, rubbing his hands over her arms. “Hold on. Calm down, what’s wrong?” Her shoulders shake under his hands when she sucks in another breath, then two more, allowing them to come slow and labored. Finally, Polina looks up at him with wide, frightened green eyes and it occurs to him that she’s never looked so alarmed, never more afraid in that moment, as if everything is falling apart. He wraps his hand around hers and wipes the dripping rain from her face. 

“I wanted to wait, I had to be sure, and then I saw Captain McCoy, and—”

“Polina!” Hikaru can’t stop the shaking in his hands when he holds her tighter. “Are you okay?”

He must have shouted because she looks more stricken than before, but focused and grounded back to the present. Her hands curl around his and she shakes her head, disbelieving and stunned when she leans closer to him, pushing into his hand for the slightest comfort he can give her. 

“Hikaru,” she sighs, “I’m going to have a baby.”

The world sharpens around them, to every drop of rain and the thudding of his heart while he tries to think what this all means, what it _can_ mean. Hikaru doesn’t want to think about what his mother would think, but that occurs to him an instant before he remembers that his mother doesn’t know and his father isn’t around to show disapproval at the same time. For a full minute, he blinks at her, feeling every pounding drop between them before he wraps his jacket tighter around her shoulders and shields her against his chest from the pouring rain, the creeping cold. 

Hikaru knows she’s burning for an answer for him long before she stirs against his chest, peeling her cheek away from his damp shirt and swallowing hard, so he stares back at her, silent and awed. 

“I don’t know what to say,” he finally laughs, which makes her frown tighter at him. “It’s…” It’s his own flesh and blood, and she looks so afraid that Hikaru crushes her against his chest again. “It’s amazing.”

“You’re not angry.” The implied question comes out a statement instead, and Hikaru just nods, glad he won’t have to move until she’s ready. Her thin fingers are shaking from the cold and nerves, but he closes his warm hand around them and hopes it’s enough to calm her. 

“I’m not angry.” There’s no way to know if the words will help at all in reassuring her, but when she falls utterly silent as his hand rests idly on her stomach, Hikaru seeks her eyes and holds her gaze. His heart can’t seem to beat fast enough, hard enough, and he feels light-headed when he looks at her and thinks of what he’s going to do now. Surely there’s some precedent for this, for learning to grow up and take responsibility for a woman he’s in love with, but for this moment in the rain, Hikaru feels utterly alone with her, trapped and as confused as ever.

“McCoy spent half an hour scolding me about condoms,” she laughs, as if that’s the worst part of this, or the funniest. Hikaru isn’t sure he shares her humor about it, so he swallows and strokes her hair slowly, rocking slowly back and forth, thinking of his mother across the world, of Polina’s dead mother, and how neither of them really know what to do now. “When she told me about the tests, she was so upset, as if it were her who was going to have a baby.”

“I’m sure she was just surprised,” he murmurs and squeezes her tighter, not quite possessive but protective enough now more than ever. He’s barely paying attention to his words when he kisses her mouth hesitantly, remembering that it can’t be good for her health to be wet and cold; that they should be somewhere warm, dry, where they can talk. They will be, but first he tucks her head under his chin and muses aloud, “We should get married.”

When she doesn’t immediately respond, he squeezes his eyes closed and presses on. “Just a day when I’m here for work, we can head out early and do it right. Someone can come along to witness, we’ll do all the right stuff, but… why not?” 

Her laugh, soft and nearly drowned out by the rain, is the only sign she gives that he’s said anything naïve at all, but Hikaru is too earnest to care right now. 

“We’ll get married,” Polina promises, her voice stronger now. He helps her to her feet and traces his thumbs along her cheekbones. He knows well that neither of them can pretend to be naïve enough to think that marriage will solve all of their problems now—it won’t even solve any but the most immediate of them—or that things will be easy. For the moment, long enough to go inside and dry off and sit down to talk about this like Hikaru knows they will; it’s okay to pretend. It’s not even really a complete lie to say they’ll be okay.

*

Nora looks up when Jim’s lighter flares to life, and the flame dances in the reflection of her eyes for a few seconds, until his cigarette smolders and it disappears again, abruptly. The creases in her forehead aren’t apparent in the moonlight filtered through his curtains, but Jim knows where they are, and he slips his cigarette between his lips and reaches out to smooth them away, both of his hands into her hair. Even in the pale light, he can see the corners of her mouth turning upward while her eyes search the rumpled sheets around their bare hips rather than meet his. She’s afraid what she’ll see there. So is Jim. He’s spent the night with a woman to see what it’s like, but after that only when he’s got nothing better to do or if he wants to fuck again. Nora sleeps in his bed more often than is safe for them to risk, but it’s worth it to him every time that someone might see them.

“Look at me, Bones,” he breathes, and when she does with warm, cinnamon eyes, he thinks that maybe he understands why Sulu might walk away from everything he’s ever known and marry his pretty sweetheart. Jim’s had a few sweethearts himself, even Carol back in Riverside, who he thought he’d marry before he joined the Army, but he’d never counted himself in love enough to leave it all behind.

That was before, this is now, and this is Bones. She rolls onto her stomach and her hair pools on his lap when she rests her cheek against his navel and Jim finds that he doesn’t need to tell her that he wants her to stay, that he’ll wash her hair in the bathtub when they untangle sweaty limbs from the sex-scented sheets and then he’ll wake her with a kiss in the morning. He could say anything to her, any of a thousand things in his head when he just looks at her, but Jim’s damn lucky. Nora doesn’t need him to say anything to understand what she’s afraid to see and he’s afraid to say; he’ll love her for as long as they’re allowed before something is cut out beneath them, just like it’s always done.

“Sulu’s getting married,” he tells her casually, blowing out a lungful of smoke and tapping his cigarette in the tray beside the bed. “Real soon, he said. They’re publishing the announcement in the paper tomorrow.” When her fingers circle the jutting bone of his hip, Jim laughs and jerks away, but she keeps her eyes averted.

“Polly’s pregnant,” she murmurs against his skin and kisses the edge of his ribs like Eve soothing an old, hollow wound to mirror her own. Jim stiffens in surprise, but Nora lifts her head and slips his cigarette from his fingers before he can drop it, takes a deep drag and stubs it out in the ashtray. She holds the smoke in her lungs as long as it takes him to remember that he needs to react somehow, but she kisses him and pushes it into his mouth, squeezing Jim’s hip like a secret promise. “I’m damn glad he’s decided to honor her.”

“Don’t be superior,” Jim laughs, leaning forward to steal another kiss from Nora’s willing, parted lips, the both of them entirely subdued when they’re like this, as if there’s nothing to lose. “You don’t think that at all.”

“No,” she agrees and stares out the window. “I don’t. I think they’re making a fool mistake getting married when they’ve barely met.”

“Now I think you’re just biased.” She shoves him when he says that, and Jim laughs with it, rolling his shoulder and pulling her up his chest so he can stroke her back while they lie together, counting ceiling tiles to the slow, steady beating of their hearts in and out of rhythm. “I guess I’m not really surprised. If I had the choice between sealing the deal, making sure someone knows that I could die and I want to be theirs and staying like this, I’d get married too, baby or not.”

“I don’t think that I would,” she remarks quietly, but when he looks down at her and touches her hair, she actually looks up at him this time, meets his eyes and there’s no doubt of the question she’s keeping to herself. _Even to me, Jim?_

“Even to you, Bones.” Jim answers the unspoken question in a whisper, quiet to keep the night from overhearing, and her eyes drop immediately. Too far, too soon, too _something._ Jim closes his own eyes and swears out loud. The mattress shifts as she climbs out of bed, the floorboards creaking under her heels as she collects her clothes and dresses so silently that all he can hear is the rustle of her clothes and her toes brushing over the floor. He expects her to turn on him, her temper to flare up and explode while she rages at him for suggesting such a thing when he _knows_ , and he does. There hasn’t been enough time since she left; she’s still hurting; she’s never going to get married again. Jim knows all of those things, but he’s said it anyway, and when her footsteps creak over to the bed, he opens his eyes.

“Look, I’m—” he begins, but she cuts him off with a brief brush of her lips over his.

“Call me after the war, Jim,” she tells him, swinging her bag over her shoulder and staring down at him, inches away from another kiss that Jim doesn’t have the nerve to take from her. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“That’s defeating the purpose,” he says instead, pushing this a little further than he knows he should, and she kisses him again to shut him up: slow, sad, and maybe he was wrong about her. She looks so much more sad than angry, at least.

Nora pauses with her trembling fingers on the door handle. He can see from across the room how badly he’s shaken her as she sighs out a heavy breath. “Then just don’t die, all right?” she says, and then she’s gone, like always. Just gone.

*

Jim supposes that he thoroughly deserves Nora’s cold professionalism when it lasts for a full week. They still work well together, but for all the times she’s caught him staring at her, Jim hasn’t seen her cast even a single lingering glance his way, nothing more than she might if they were colleagues and nothing more. It’s the worst part of it, really. Sleeping alone is insult added to injury while Sulu and Polina plan the wedding hastily, because he’s got a mission planned in a few short weeks and neither of them are the kind to take chances.

It isn’t until after another one of Sulu’s solemn presentations, when the room is clearing, that Jim gets the chance to talk to him, and feels relieved when Sulu smiles in greeting rather than leaving silently, which Nora has taken to doing.

“Is everything all right with you and Captain McCoy?” Sulu asks and lifts his eyebrow, looking past Jim for a moment at Polina, smiling faintly, and turning back to the conversation, aptly sharp as always.

“We’re fine,” Jim lies smoothly, because what else would he say? “I’m actually looking to talk to you about something a little bird told me.” He sees Sulu straighten immediately, but Jim only smiles disarmingly. 

“That depends what you’ve been hearing,” he says, lowering his voice. Jim thinks his immediate defensiveness is probably a little endearing, at least for Polina, who’s slipped out already to Sulu’s apparent dismay. 

“I’ll save congratulations on your new additions until at least a month after the wedding,” Jim quips and slams his mouth shut when Sulu glares at him coldly. “Right. Actually, Bones is having a fit after hearing from Miss Uhura that she’s getting married in the same skirt and blouse she wears every day to work.”

Sulu actually looks surprised. “I didn’t realize that was a problem. We really haven’t got anything else we could use, so it’s... settled, I guess.”

“Wrong,” Jim grins at him and thrusts his bag at him, watching Sulu open it up with his forehead wrinkled up. “Funny story. I was doing inventory for General Pike’s staff, have to sign off on all of that, you know, since the General doesn’t have time. As it turns out, though, we had an extra parachute no one could account for. Could be a relic from the Great War, but we aren’t sure. Anyway, you know how the Army is. Everything has a place, even an extra parachute means someone’s got to get threatened with court martial until they confess that it was an enemy bribe. You’re doing me a real favor if you can take it off my hands.” 

Sulu unfolds a corner of the parachute and stares at it incredulously, fingering the silk slowly. “Are you actually serious?”

“It was the closest thing to a wedding present I could get you two.” He shrugs and crosses his arms over his chest, looking out the window, where the afternoon drizzle has been broken by pale sunshine. “I don’t know if Polly’s much of a seamstress, but if she needs help, Uhura and Captain McCoy have both offered to lend a hand.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.” Sulu pushes the parachute back into the bag and pulls the flap back over it. When Jim slaps him on the back, he loses his balance and barely rights himself in time to keep from tumbling forward.

“Because you’re a lucky man and if I could give you more than just a bit of silk scraps, I would.” He grins one more time and starts toward the door with a jaunty spring in his heel. Sulu follows leadenly, and Jim turns, starts to tell him not to worry about Nora, but quashes the urge immediately. “There are some tears around the edges, but I’m sure the ladies can cut those out.”

“Thanks,” Sulu says and holds the bag gingerly. “I... I really owe you a lot, Jim.”

“Don’t mention it. Get out of here and find Polly,” he grins and points at him as seriously as he can while keeping the grin firmly on his face. If there’s a man who deserves this kind of happiness, it’s Sulu. Jim can’t say he’s not really jealous of his luck, but he quashes it as firmly as he can in favor of holding the door for him. “Seriously, don’t mention it. Pike would have my ass.”


	3. Part III

_December 1943_

Polina wakes up expecting the office to be shaking around her with the recent bombings, back to waiting for them to reach them here and working longer hours than anyone would reasonably advise, but there’s nothing, not even the far-off whine of the planes. She’s awake, though, and her sleep-scrambled brain tells her that the world was shaking only a moment before she registers the hands on her shoulders and remembers that she has to open her eyes, too.

“Good morning, sunshine,” Hikaru greets with a weary smile, standing next to the chair she fell asleep in, close enough that she can smell pungent fuel and the faintest whiff of atmosphere on his jumpsuit, which he hasn’t changed out of yet. There must be something wrong, something he had to deliver immediately, and her heart drops from her chest in terror.

“Don’t talk about sunshine to me,” she moans instead, feigning normalcy, dreading the thought of work after barely sleeping; because of working late and the baby shifting, she tells herself, not because she was worried about him. She stretches her arms out and rests her hands on the unfamiliar swell of her belly when she finishes with a soft, whimpering groan. Then she looks at him seriously, searching for an injury, but he’s entirely unmarked with the exception of a smudge on his cheek and a bone-deep weariness creasing his forehead. “Everything’s well, then?”

“Well as it can be,” he laughs and holds out his hands for her, smiling a little broader when she lets him fold his around hers and pull her to her feet with him. “Been a few long days. I came straight here to do a briefing after landing. It’s not until 0900, though. Thought I’d come see you instead, but they said you hadn’t come back for bed last night.”

“There were things I needed to do,” she explains calmly. There’s a long day ahead of her, but she doesn’t say anything about that, just straightens her skirt and nods at him, at his earnest, warm smile telling her that he’s gone flying through hell for her alone. His face brightens more still when he cups his hands around her face and smears grease across her pale cheeks.

“I missed you like hell,” he breathes, rubbing their noses together until she laughs. She feels the warmth of his breath across her lips like a phantom kiss, but Hikaru holds her still and kisses her slowly, ignoring her parted lips except to tug her lower lip between his teeth.

“Kiss me,” she commands, but her authority cracks under his laughter joining hers, his hand drifting toward her belly with a smile she can feel crushed against her lips.

“I need to talk to you,” he mouths against her and Polina’s heart sinks immediately with the strike of fear that always comes, that something is going to happen to one or both of them, but mostly him. So she pulls away and stares at him expectantly until he collects himself and manages to look her in the eye.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he laughs, pushing his hair back and sighing slowly. “It’s just work as usual, just a little longer term. I’ve been flying over the Channel mostly, but the way things are, they need a better look over enemy lines in Italy. We don’t—”

She presses a finger to his lips and nods solemnly. This is something she can have faith in: in him and his ability. “Okay,” she says simply and Hikaru looks relieved. She won’t ask him to write letters all the time, or to send word, because she knows that things are busy enough without worrying about that, too. She has work to be doing too, or else she wouldn’t be sleeping in Spock’s office when even he’s left, though she had promised that it would only be a few more minutes the night before.

“They’ll send up a replacement a couple times while I’m gone,” he explains with an easy smile that betrays none of his nerves, but she knows by looking at all of him: his twitching fingers on her waist, the shadow that flits through his eyes for a bare second. “It’s not for long. I’ll be back in a week or two. I still have things I need to do here.”

Polina nods and kisses him once more, abbreviated but no less warm. She won’t think about the possibility that he might not come back, the same old fear as always. “Just get back before the baby comes,” she says, and he laughs.

“You don’t need to worry about that. I need to be here to help you pick out a name, anyway.”

She just rolls her eyes while he keeps laughing, because they’ve talked about this before, lying in a bed together for the first time after the wedding and musing about names. She’d advocated for her parents’ names, and he’d suggested simpler names because he’d always struggled with his own. Polina had written them off as too common, Walter and Rosemary, and assumed that he’d come around in time anyway, but Hikaru hasn’t seemed to change his mind yet. Thinking about names makes the baby more real for her, though it’s kicked her often enough to make itself real and the regular visits with McCoy confirm that it’s there and growing.

“We have names,” she tells him firmly and heads for the door. She’ll need to freshen up a little before Spock comes back to his office to work again, but Hikaru follows her with a case he must have brought with him for the briefing and she smiles at him over her shoulder as they walk.

Everything is a little easier with Hikaru, even the flashing panic that didn’t fully fade for months, until talking at length with Spock, about what would happen to duties and to _her_ , and with McCoy, about what to expect with her body and the time after, when the baby is there and so is she.

‘Life goes on,’ McCoy had told her with her arms crossed over her chest, and continued where Spock hadn’t when he told her much the same, ‘whether you’re ready for it or not.’

Polina believes it now, and feels much more confident in her ability to handle this: baby and work and the persisting whispers when she carries on with her work. She doesn’t really live for when Hikaru can come, for word that he’s made it back all right, because she has other things to occupy herself with and people who have been more supportive of her than she thought they might. Spock and Uhura, who she works with every day, are not especially talkative at work, but supportive and considerate. The rough mechanic who came to her wedding from Benson sends her word often about how Hikaru is doing, when he’s too busy to do it himself. Even Kirk is respectfully supportive in his own way, chatting with her whenever they’re not working, while walking between buildings and during meals and after work, long after the sun has disappeared for the night. McCoy is businesslike most of the time, but Polina catches the hints of her concern between rough words and a callous attitude that extends to everyone except Kirk, with whom she seems formal and stiff.

The morning sun is slow to rise and the frost on the grass hasn’t melted yet, glittering in the warm light, and Polina slips her hand into Hikaru’s because they can, because he’s there and because McCoy’s words echo with Spock’s in her head, the lesson she’s learned again and again over the last year since meeting Hikaru: life goes on.

*

Jim’s on his way to Spock’s office when he sees McKenna, the pilot sent to deliver film and brief the intelligence group while Sulu’s gone, standing outside the building with a frown to go with the case of information he’s carrying for them. The man is nice enough, professional and serious when he needs to be, but he’s relatively new to the job and he doesn’t know how to anticipate Spock’s probing questions the way Sulu does. It doesn’t help that Polina is deliberately cold and professional, plainly taking lessons from Nora where McKenna is concerned, even though the poor man can’t help that he’s not her husband.

“McKenna,” he calls brightly, pulling his hat off as he approaches the door and ushers him inside from the cold.

“Major,” he greets, turning around and frowning at him. For the first time, Jim realizes that he’s holding a piece of paper loose from the rest of the portfolio against his chest. “Good to see you.”

“Good seeing you, too,” Jim says, trying hard to keep his tone even and unworried. “You had a safe trip up here?”

McKenna nods and looks at the door to Spock’s office with a tight frown. Pike has a meeting in London and took Nora with him, leaving Jim to see to the briefing, which leaves McKenna and Jim the only ones who haven’t come in for it to start. “Mr. Spock’s assistant is Sulu’s wife, isn’t she?” he asks, though Jim is sure he already knows. Polina and Sulu aren’t subtle, and their wedding was a small, bright spot in everything else.

“Yeah,” he says and tucks his hat into the pocket of his coat. Polina’s a lot more than just an assistant, another difference between Sulu and McKenna that Jim knows isn’t fair to judge him by, but now doesn’t seem like a good time to quibble over details. McKenna’s face changes and Jim’s heart drops toward his shoes by the pitying look he shoots the door. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve just got word from the squadron he was with down there. There’s…” He waves the piece of paper in his hand, which Jim stops himself from grabbing impatiently, just to get one with it. “There’s bad news. His plane went down, they haven’t heard from him. Scotty asked me to bring it up to her, it’s just happened a few days ago.”

Jim is aware of his body moving, but he feels numb, like it’s not really him moving his limbs when he reaches for the paper, folds it, and pushes it into his pocket. It’s not fair for McKenna to have to be the messenger of ill tidings, he thinks when he stares at McKenna and knows he looks entirely composed, no matter how he feels. “Let me do this, okay?”

McKenna nods tightly and walks ahead of him into the room. Polina looks at the two of them with her eyebrows up when they walk in, but turns back to her notes almost immediately, so blissfully unaware that Jim wants to hide the paper in his pocket and undo everything so he won’t have to do this. He’s never had to tell someone that someone else they love is dead, or might be dead, or whatever Sulu is, but she deserves better than a complete stranger telling her so.

The rest of the briefing is standard, and Jim takes notes like always, but when the group breaks apart, McKenna excusing himself quietly now that his part is finished, Spock and Uhura hovering by the desk and chatting in quiet German, which Jim doesn’t begrudge them. The man needs something to connect him to his homeland, and Jim isn’t ignorant enough to think that a bit of human interaction, the privacy of a subtle courtship, makes either of them a traitor.

“Polina,” he says quietly while she gathers up her things: a notebook full of calculations and letters scratched out and rewritten over and over. Her hands move over her belly and Jim’s breath comes short, the sight hitting him like a blow. Nora would be better at this, she would know what to say, but she’s not around like he needs her to be, so it has to be him.

“Major,” she says quietly, her voice edged with weariness. Her eyes have dark circles under them, and Jim knows that it’s because she misses him, because sleeping alone is something she knows how to do, but doesn’t want to do anymore.

He helps her with her coat, watches her button it carefully, and offers his arm for her, which she refuses silently.

“I’ve gotten word about your—about Hikaru,” he says when they step into the hallway. McKenna sees them from the window and leaves at those words. Jim can’t blame him, but he turns his attention to Polina, whose forehead is wrinkled up and her expression expectant.

“Well?” she asks shortly, and Jim takes the paper out of his pocket, leaving his hat behind and holding it out to her.

“His plane went down earlier this week.” He pushes the words out with effort and wishes immediately he could take them back. Strong as she is, there’s nothing that can prepare her for this, not now, not when they’ve _just_ gotten married, and there’s the child that hasn’t even been born yet that may never see Sulu, and it’s too much like Jim’s father for him to stand. He knows that kind of loneliness, that kind of insecurity growing up, and what his mother went through to raise him and his brother by herself.

Polina is still reading the paper, her fingers shaking and her face pale, but she doesn’t shake off his hand when he closes it around her small shoulder.

“It doesn’t mean anything yet.” Immediately, he wants to stop himself from saying anything more, because that’s not necessarily good, either. He doesn’t want to doom Sulu, but he doesn’t want to give her false hope when nothing’s certain yet, either. “It just means his plane’s missing, they’ll—they’ll find him, okay?” Nothing seems to come out right, but he suspects nothing ever will, no matter how hard he tries.

She folds the paper up and Jim catches her expression before she walks away to sink down in a nearby chair. Her eyes are wide and panicked, but her mouth is set firmly, too strong to break, though there’s no telling if it’s only out of stubborn will to maintain control in front of him or sheer determination to endure. He wants to ask if she needs water, or space, or a hand to hold; if she needs to break apart or if this is enough, to sit in shock and wait.

Finally, Jim sits down next to her and says nothing at all for a long time. She breaks the silence first, unfolding her hands from her lap and plunging the paper into her pocket as she stands decisively.

“We can’t stop working, then,” she says firmly, but her voice shakes and Jim hears what she wants to say: just keep going, and maybe they’ll survive.

*

The light in Jim’s room is still on when they make it back from London, and though Pike has already waved Nora along and wished her a good night because they’re both drained from the trip, she hesitates outside the door on the other side of Pike’s. She hasn’t been fair to Jim for months, and she hasn’t apologized for overreacting when it was nothing but a small, offhand comment amidst a post-coital glow. Nora’s had plenty of time to justify what happened, but never enough time to talk to Jim like before.

She misses him all the time, working together in fluid tandem, but her irrational fears, the aversion to letting anyone close enough to matter, keep her from interacting with him any more than is professionally necessary. Pike noticed almost immediately, but it wasn’t until the trip to London that he’s said anything to indicate that he knows more than he’s let on.

‘I think I liked it more when my aides were keeping me up at night,’ he had joked in the car, one eyebrow cocked up and Nora had sworn under her breath. Pike laughed at that, too, like Jim used to, and she’d only scowled at him. It’s not a wonder that Pike picked Jim as his aide, they’ve got a lot in common.

Nora quashes the thought when it rises again, and all the feelings that bubble up awkwardly, just like she doesn’t need, and walks past the door to her own. She’s still unknotting her tie when there’s a knock and she looks over her shoulder at it and sighs knowingly.

“Bones?”

“It’s open, Jim,” she says casually and starts removing pins from her hair instead so she can look as disinterested as possible, when she turns around and sees his face as the door clicks closed. The cold, professional façade drops immediately. “What’s going on?”

“Sulu’s missing in Italy,” he answers and holds out a non-descript bottle that she’s sure would smell a hell of a lot like the ad hoc cologne clinging to his skin. “It’s not going over very well here on the home front.”

Nora pulls out her desk chair and offers it to him, taking the bottle out of his hand and setting it on the desk with a frown. “I thought my day was bad. Who sent word?”

Jim waves his hand absently and sits on the end of her bed instead. “McKenna got stuck with the job of telling her, so I told him I would. Uhura’s tried to convince her to leave the office and get some rest most of the night. She didn’t budge until Spock told her that she was endangering the baby.”

“And that worked.” Of course it would. Nora hasn’t agreed with Spock on everything, finding his cold logic and tactless approach to things that _really matter_ to her and to everyone else in the country hard to swallow, but she can’t deny that he’s been invaluable and working with him has been something most people would regard as an honor. Polina is one of those people, and Nora is just glad that he has enough sense to dispense the same advice she would herself.

“She left, but I’ll bet she’s not sleeping.”

“Naturally,” she says and pushes her loose hair out of her face, shaking her head and trying to absorb it in through numbed nerves. Before she left him, her husband told her that she wasn’t cut out for war, women couldn’t handle that kind of pressure, and she’d left a nick on his forehead from the diamond on her engagement ring for it. He was talking about grueling battlefields and hospital wards full of men groaning and bloody, but she’s seen things like that, and the only thing that’s made her feel like she can’t handle it is this, the goddamn politics, the breakdown of human spirit and the scramble to keep people together.

“I can’t give her anything to help her sleep,” she sighs and sits down on the bed next to him. “Nothing that might not hurt that baby.”

“You would have known what to say.” Jim looks vulnerable and unkempt when her eyes lift to his. She just laughs bitterly and closes her hand around his firmly, too firm to be intimate.

“I bet you did the best you could, Jim. Were you going to let Spock tell her?”

This time, he laughs, choking out the sound and pulling another smile from her. “Right. That’ll be a good comfort when I’m up all night thinking how I’m a monster for telling a pregnant woman her husband’s probably dead. My mom hated the poor bastard who told her about my dad almost as much as she hated his commanding officer for getting them both killed.”

“Jim.” She stands up this time and picks up the bottle, pulls out the same pair of glasses they’ve been using since they were in America, and pours him a couple fingers’ worth of the pungent whiskey. “We’re not going to let her deal with it by herself like she’s in some kind of hole. We’ve gotten her this far with him, we’ll see what happens.” He eyes her skeptically, but she thrusts the glass out to him.

“Drink that,” she orders firmly and doesn’t even scowl when he smiles at that, accepting the glass.

“Don’t forget I rank you,” he reminds her and she only pours herself the same amount she gave him, lifts the glass and clinks it against his. A truce, though they weren’t really at war.

She smiles, a real one. “I’m sorry,” she says, and it’s just as sincere, even if she’s sorry that they can’t be more than this, too.

*

The first flyover was mostly uneventful, but Hikaru thinks that he can attribute that at least in part to the cloud cover that accompanied him for the whole day when he reached the enemy position. He’s not even sure the shots fired at him were whole-hearted, but everyone was anticipating snow again, and the mountains are treacherous anyway. If anything, even the Germans were preparing for the snow, digging down and not planning on moving for a while because the Allies weren’t going to be able to move either.

The second day, another flyover between waves of snow, was much different, even though the sky wasn’t clear now, either. Scotty was still back at Benson and Hikaru wasn’t as familiar with Olson, the mechanic working on his plane down here, at least until he was cleared to go back. Their communications were halting and professional, without any of the familiar warmth and cheer that Hikaru got used to with Scotty. It wasn’t permanent, anyway, and he lived by that as a mantra when he took off and adjusted course back toward the German lines. It was the last flyover he’d have to do until the snow cleared entirely, the last chance they have to get out before the runway ices over and they’re completely grounded.

He’s been angry at himself since the crash, how close he came to getting it over with if he hadn’t been distracted when the radio crackled to life and Olson’s voice came through too rough to understand immediately. Hikaru knows now what Olson was trying to tell him: that their weather reports were coming back and it was too dangerous, the wind was picking up rapidly and the barometer was dropping. He doesn’t even remember much of the crash except jamming his fingers into the controls and trying to regain altitude until it was too late and he just tried to control the crash into the nearby trees.

It wasn’t even until he woke up again that he thought of Polina, the baby, his _mother_ and what she’ll think, if she ever gets word.

Hikaru doesn’t think he was out very long, because half a platoon of Germans circled the plane within an hour, when he’d just managed to get out of the Spitfire and catch a glimpse of his mangled camera equipment. His German is limited to what he’s picked up from Spock and Uhura, very little from training, but he’d been cold and his flight suit wasn’t enough to protect from the thick snow already falling, so he held up his hands and picked through his mind for the words he needed to communicate what the soldiers already seemed to know as they search him for weapons he didn’t have then any more than now.

It’s been three weeks since then, but the snow and terrain has made it harder to transport him anywhere, let alone wherever the Germans send their POWs. He’s the only one with this group, and while he’s sure there’s some protocol in place for them, they don’t seem to care much. He’s sure that his ribs are broken in at least a couple places, and they haven’t healed yet, but the other cuts and wounds don’t seem to have become infected. One of the soldiers makes sure he eats with them every night, and they provide him with a civilian-style coat to keep off the chill while they huddle around the fire together. Hikaru doesn’t expect his luck to hold, and the dynamic is clear between all of them: that he’s still a prisoner and they won’t allow him to escape. He wandered too far into the woods once on his own, and was pulled back to camp by an angry-sounding soldier with a mop of dark hair.

Hikaru doesn’t have any way of writing down days, especially as the Germans don’t let him near anything sharp long enough to carve lines into his boot, but he remembers them anyway, whittling away his time by counting back the days, doing the math in his head and trying to determine when Polina’s baby is due, furious with himself for the crash and his own ineptitude, for being captured and unable to make it to her like he promised. The Germans have their conversations and laughter and unmistakably bitter remarks that Hikaru pretends are about the war, that they’re just as weary of it as he is. Most of the time, he thinks of Polina, or goes through the motions of flying a plane in his head, remembering switches and gauges, telling himself that he’ll get out of this and back to her. It could be worse, but he decides that it could be much, much better before he’ll be satisfied.

The opportunity to run comes unexpectedly, and though Hikaru has been looking for one ceaselessly since he was pulled away from the Spitfire, he nearly misses the chance.

There’s yet another snowstorm during the fourth week, and Hikaru is sent to retrieve wood for the camp by the soldier he’s figured out is in charge of all the others. The logic is impeccable, that it’s too dangerous for Hikaru to leave, and they’ve determined that he’s unlikely to run just yet. He’s starting to get the impression that they must think he’s dumb, not just unable to speak German, and the roar of laughter from the camp behind him when he trudges off through the snow seems to confirm it.

The snow is falling heavily, and when he makes it deep enough into the forest, Hikaru pauses to look up at it, closing his eyes and taking in the muffled silence for a few seconds before it strikes him like a bolt and he turns and starts walking at first, then breaks into a run the farther he gets, blessing the falling snow as it covers his footprints behind him, though his breathing is ragged and his chest burns horribly from his broken ribs.

The shout echoes ahead to him minutes later, and when a bullet whizzes past his arm and buries itself into the tree next to him, Hikaru drops into the snow and pushes back toward the tree trunk. The mop-headed German is approaching him with his gun shaking, which is surprising to Hikaru because he nearly hit him before, but he’s speaking in a string of German too fast for Hikaru to hope to understand, so he just shakes his head.

“I have to,” he insists earnestly and the soldier points his handgun at him, or at least in Hikaru’s direction, and Hikaru freezes. “Please. _Bitte._ I have—” His limited German fails him again, but he pushes himself up to his feet again, knees shaking and watery. “A wife. A baby— _eine Frau._ ”

His eyebrows jump, but his eyes soften just a little, just enough. “ _Sie haben eine Frau?_ ”

“Eine—yes! And a small—a baby. I have a baby, please understand. Please, please.” He’s already established that the man doesn’t speak any English, if any, though he tried a poor impression of Japanese shortly after Hikaru was captured, but Hikaru had only looked at him blankly and that had ended quickly.

The German lifts his gun again and fires deliberately over Hikaru’s head, into the trunk, and the barrel of his gun smokes a little.

“Go,” he says sternly, and Hikaru stands stock still when he turns around, shouts loudly in German back to the others, and walks away without looking back.

Hikaru doesn’t question luck, and he doesn’t need telling twice. He turns as well and starts running again, hard, in the opposite direction.

*

The clouds over the estate promise snow when Jim comes out of the intelligence hut after another late afternoon meeting, thinking of the stack of reports in his bedroom that he’ll still have to review before bed. He sighs and adjusts his jacket. It’s too late in the season for snow, but he’s seen it snow on the first day of spring back home in Iowa, and no one here looks very surprised anyway. It doesn’t seem like anything could faze anyone here anymore, they’re all so hardened to the reality of war that Jim can’t even begin to understand. He remembers seeing it in Sulu’s eyes shortly after he arrived, the kind of desperation that Jim doesn’t have; the kind that comes with fight or flight, a will to survive.

“Jim!”

His eyebrows jump in surprise when he turns, recognizing the hollow shout as Nora’s before he even sees her striding toward him from a few doors down. “Fancy seeing you here,” he grins easily, if only to hide his pounding heart when she looks at him that urgently, without a trace of the brusque professionalism that’s become the norm between them lately. “Something going on?”

“No.” She looks uncomfortable for a minute, but she shakes her head and adjusts her skirt, looking at the ground to avoid his stare. “Pike’s fine. He’s having dinner with Spock again.”

Jim nods and starts walking back toward the barracks, slow enough that she can follow him at her own pace. He looks up at the dark, heavy clouds and clamps his jaw shut to keep from commenting on something stupid like the weather, or how much he’s missed just being around her like this: quiet and relaxed, though she looks jittery when she looks at him again.

“I don’t see you much these days,” she muses and tucks her hat into her pocket so she can fix her hair while they walk, sounding anything but casual. Jim wants to tell her that there’s no one to see her but him, and he’s seen her much more flustered, much more disorganized than right then, but she knows that. When she meets his eyes, he knows that she’s thinking the same thing, and they both slow to a stop.

“Pike’s keeping us busy,” he answers calmly, and her eyebrow spikes. Jim takes a breath and looks over her seriously. “If I could take it all back and, I don’t know, Bones, _unsay_ it, I would. I miss—”

“If you say you miss a warm body in your bed, so help me, Jim—”

“I was going to say I miss hanging around you and being your friend, though I know it _seems_ like all I’d miss is a roll in the hay with you.” She scoffs, but when Jim manages to catch her eye again with a dim smile, she returns it wearily.

“I…” She holds the silence following the syllable for a long time before she reaches into her jacket and holds out a piece of crisp, folded paper to him. “I got a letter from my husband.”

The warm feeling in Jim’s chest that had begun to build when she smiled at him evaporates immediately when he accepts the paper from her and stares at it with his eyebrows pulled together tightly. “What does he want?” he asks sharply, looking up at her over the paper before he’s even read more than the salutation, a sickeningly formal _Darling Eleanor_ , when Jim’s written notes to her with nothing more than _Bones_ scrawled across the top in scratchy letters instead of formal lettering like this.

“He wants to reconcile,” she says simply and Jim notices for the first time that she’s tugging on the third finger of her left hand, which has been bare for nearly a year now. “Dammit, Jim, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to _think_ about it, don’t ask me that.”

He grunts noncommittally, because that’s exactly what he was going to ask first. Then he finally skims over the letter, putting off the urge to roll his eyes at the evident groveling even though he knows he’s not much better when it comes to her, and when he’s done he looks over the paper and at her while she looks past his shoulder into the distance. Jim says the only thing he can think of that isn’t asking her to tear up the letter and ignore it. “He didn’t ask you to give it up.”

“He wants to meet in London sometime soon,” she says quietly, and Jim folds the letter up carefully, as if he’ll offend her by crushing it in his fist.

“You’ll see him then?” he asks, and she arches an eyebrow at him, seeing right through him like she always does, even now.

Nora sighs and takes the letter back from him, pushing it into her pocket and sighing slowly, as if she’s pushing all the tension out of her body through one, slow breath. “I’ll decide that before I write back.”

“If you just need someone to talk to, you know I’m here,” he finally says, and it finally dawns on him that’s the reason she stopped him after all. She laughs and stares him down for a few seconds, as if to tell him that, yeah, she knows. She’s trying, too, just as much as Jim is. He wonders if it’s enough.

“I should probably—”

“Bones,” he interrupts her, almost as soon as she starts talking, and rests his warm hand over her cold, pink cheek. She’s silent, if only for once, and waiting for him to do whatever he’s going to do, which is just to try to get through her stubborn façade right now. “I lied, Bones. I wouldn’t take it back, not for anything.”

She pulls her head away from his hand, but Jim pulls her back, reaching between them for her hand and squeezing it gently. “I’m not going to play games with you, Jim. I’m—” Her protest is cut off by his sudden, fierce kiss, and he laughs against her mouth when he can all but _hear_ her rolling her eyes at him, at his gallant notions of romance. When he pulls away and meets her fierce stare, the smile fades again, but he squeezes her hand and holds on.

“Bones, I’m serious.”

She huffs out a soft sigh and shakes her head, more to convince herself than anyone else, let alone Jim. “I haven’t decided what to do about—about you, or my husband, or any of it.”

“I kind of thought as much.” He pulls away, tucking his hands into the pockets of his jacket, safe and warm and away from Nora, who relaxes and doesn’t look away this time. “I’m still going to be in love with you, no matter what you decide,” he says, easy as giving one of their daily briefings, and he catches her looking at him twice, caught unaware by actually vocalizing the words for the first time.

“You don’t mean that,” she snorts and starts walking again, back toward the barracks where Jim is sure they’ll have a cup of coffee and work until the sun is gone and the snow is five inches deep outside. He’s sure, looking at the expression in her eyes that he knows to mean that she’s not walking away tonight, that they’ll drink heavily and fall into bed and fuck, just like before only pretending he never said anything at all. Her hand doesn’t fall into his until they’re inside the barracks, but it makes him no less sure that they’ll sleep tangled around each other tonight, warm and sated and together.

He’s sure he means it, too, even if she doubts him; even if he’s not sure what happens when they wake up in the cold, dim light of morning.

*

“You’re here late again.”

Polina looks up when she hears Kirk’s voice from the doorway and sets down her pen. He waves for her to stay sitting and pulls a chair up to the desk.

“Think I can give you a hand with your…” His face falls when he looks over at the pad of paper in front of her. “Maybe not.” She laughs, a quiet sound that felt unnatural and strange to her. She didn’t do enough of it before, but she’s been nothing but tired and emotionally withdrawn from the world since Hikaru left, though the last month of her pregnancy is likely to have no small part of that.

“You do well at what you do,” she says and pushes the pad away, looking at him seriously. “Did she send you to scold me for working again?”

Kirk looks honestly stricken and she laughs again. “Bones? No, she’s probably writing a report for Pike this late. I saw the light was on. I know better than to talk you out of it as long as I can persuade you to eat something and get some sleep for that baby.”

She makes a face and sighs, shaking her head and crossing an arm over her stomach while rubbing her eyes. She’s had cramping all day, and working in the office is one way to take her mind off of things, though she thinks of what McCoy told her to expect when labor came and can deduce that this is at least the start of it. “I’m not hungry, and the baby won’t let me sleep.”

“Will you let me keep you company for a while, then? The barracks are a little too quiet for me tonight.” She looks at him and knows that it means that he doesn’t want to be alone, either, though Polina had never thought of him as the kind of man who worried so much about that kind of thing, or someone who was ever alone anyway.

Polina sucks in a soft, slow breath, and stares at him, unbothered by silence, though she’s the one to break it first. “What happened between you and McCoy?”

He laughs aloud, disarmed again by her straightforward tactics. “I don’t know what you think—”

“I’m not stupid,” she insists, because she knows by the way they come into meetings together, the sad looks he sends her way when he thinks no one is paying attention, the stiff longing that’s all been that much more apparent recently.

Kirk falls silent for a long time, turning a pen over in his hands, and she grits her teeth at another wave of pain. “You don’t have to answer,” she finally concedes and stands up, rubbing her back.

“Are you okay?” he asks, standing up and hovering close to her, but she just looks up at him and laughs, shaking her head.

“I’ve been counting like McCoy told me,” she says and watches everything fall into place for him with an alarmed expression while she stares back apathetically.

“You’re in labor? Why in hell didn’t you—”

“I wasn’t planning on delivering in the office! She told me to wait until they were closer before I went to see her.” Polina rolls her eyes, but Kirk looks at her like she belongs in an asylum before taking her arm and steering her back toward the chair, then turning and looking at the door.

“You’re not about—I mean. I don’t know anything about this,” he stammers and shakes his head. “I’m taking you to the office she uses. You know where—”

“She told me I was pregnant, Major,” she snaps back at him. “I know.”

“At this point, I think I’m about to help deliver your baby, Polly,” he laughs incredulously, leading her through the doorway. “You can call me Jim.”

He leaves her in the sterile office McCoy uses and returns with her minutes later, while she’s still pulling her hair back and straightening her clothes: a mix of her long skirt and a blouse that she plainly pulled on only moments before.

“How are you feeling, kid?” she asks, shooting a look over her shoulder at Kirk—Jim—who hovers in the corner looking green before resting her hands on her belly with an unyielding, but not quite stony, expression.

“I thought I’d come see you in the morning,” she says quietly. “It felt like—”

McCoy doesn’t say anything, but her expression darkens and she pulls away. “Baby’s turned around,” she announces and takes a slow breath. “I’m glad you listened to what I said, but it won’t make a difference.”

“Then what are we—” she starts, and Jim’s out of the corner and across the room, looking at her while his hair sticks up.

“Bones, you have to do something,” he says urgently. Polina doesn’t have the energy to even nod, too afraid that this means the worst, that she’ll lose this, too, and then she won’t know what to do. “Operate, turn the baby, do something—we don’t have a surgery, I don’t—”

“Unbelievably, Jim, I went to medical school and became a doctor,” McCoy grumbles. “And when I joined the Army, they made sure I knew how to do _field surgery_ , in case there was an emergency and I needed to do things like _be a doctor_.” She squeezes Polina’s hand in what she must hope is reassuring, though it doesn’t do much but ground her. Polina holds on tighter and McCoy gives her a reassuring smile.

“The baby’s breach,” she says again, “And it’s too late to turn. You’re close to delivery, I’m sure you’re at least partially dilated now, but I’m going to operate, and it’s going to be fine. I’ve done it before, you’re healthy, and…” She looks over at Jim, who sets his jaw and meets her gaze. “And I’ve got someone to assist. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than I’d expected.”

Polina nods despite the cold feeling in her stomach and the persistent ache that seems that much more sinister. She doesn’t know if it’s safe to believe in them yet, in good fortune, but between Jim’s determination and McCoy’s calm reassurance, she can have a little faith just once, just in case.

“Okay,” she says, and watches McCoy’s chest rise with her next breath, everything sharp and clear around them, even the echo of Jim’s shoes when he turns to retrieve McCoy’s medical bag from her room. Vaguely, she thinks of Hikaru’s last promise: that he’d be here to fight over names after the baby is born, and realizes that she doesn’t even mind that he can’t keep that promise, as long as he keeps the one he made when they met.

As if Jim can read her mind, the last thing she thinks she sees before she goes under is his face hovering over her and feels his hand on her shoulder, quietly reassuring her as her eyelids fall. _He’s not dead,_ and she clings to those words through the suffocating chemical darkness.

*

When she wakes out of her doze, it takes Polina a few, disoriented seconds to realize that there’s someone just on the other side of the curtain. “Hello?” she calls in a throaty croak and smiles when Jim pulls back the curtain and grins at her.

“Take a look at that pretty girl there,” he drawls, pulling up the chair beside her bed and cooing over the baby in her arms. Polina isn’t ready to hand her over just yet, not with the gossamer threads of her dark curls or the soft flare of her nostrils that are so much like Hikaru. Jim doesn’t look like he expects to hold her, anyway, so when he finishes adjusting the blankets around her, he sits back and looks at her with that canny, knowing smile of his. “Looks just like her mama.”

“She looks so much like Hikaru,” Polina laughs weakly and allows her eyes to drift back down to the small body in her arms, staying quiet to keep from disturbing the rest of the patients in the room with the cracking in her voice. “It’s startling.”

“You’ll see,” Jim promises her and sits back, waiting for her to look up at him again. “She’s going to be the next Helen of Troy.”

“Don’t say something like that about my daughter, Jim.” She has the creeping feeling that he’s here for something other than an amiable chat, but if he expects her to break down like a sobbing widow after their conversation, Polina thinks that she’ll enjoy disappointing him, at least. The ache of _missing_ Hikaru runs much deeper than the depths of her bones, something that rattles through her with every breath and every beating of her heart; something she doesn’t even quite know how to express with something as simple as sadness or any word. It scares her.

“Does she have a name yet?” Jim asks when he looks up to her face again, apparently too smitten to pay her full attention. His eyes flicker up and twinkle with amusement. “You could name her after me. As thanks for finding Bones and getting you to labor safely.”

“It’s too bad she’s not a boy, or maybe I would,” she says, though she knows that she certainly wouldn’t have.

“The next one, though,” he continues, still smiling at her. “I’ll tell Hikaru that it has to be a boy so you can name him after me.”

The words don’t even sting the way Polina expected they might, but she looks away from Jim and back to the baby. “I named her Rosemary.” Jim looks up at her and Polina meets his eyes again and neither of them looks away. Maybe Jim knows the significance of the name, how hard she pushed against it. She straightens her back just a little more. “And Eleanor, because of—”

His face barely betrays his surprise, but the twitch of his mouth and the sudden blink come before he barks out a warm laugh that Polina knows is only mostly genuine. “Have you told Bones that yet?”

“It seemed appropriate.”

“Well,” Jim sighs dramatically, “Rosemary Eleanor Sulu, you’re going to be one smart lady one day. And you, Mrs. Sulu, better hold up your promise about naming a boy after me. Bones won’t let me live it down until we’re back on even standing.”

“I think,” Polina begins, but her voice chokes and dies immediately, as if some part of her is rebelling against the notion of discussing a future that is undoubtedly impossible, at least with Hikaru. She’s content to let the subject drop entirely, and Jim sits back expectantly, waiting for her to continue. She looks down at the baby to avoid looking at him. “You would tell me if you knew anything about him.”

Jim seems to understand that it’s a statement, an affirmation of her faith in him, and the last of his bitterness melts away. “As soon as I heard it, you’d know first. Before Pike.”

She feels satisfied by that answer, but not even that, not even her unshaken faith in Jim is enough to settle the same dead ache in the pit of her stomach that’s been present since Jim came to her that night. So she asks the last question she wants an honest answer to, “Do you think he’s alive?”

Jim stands up. “I sure as hell hope he is.” It’s not a real answer, but she guesses that he already knew that she didn’t really want one, anyway. “If he’s not, I’ll track him down and kill him for leaving a couple of pretty girls on their own.” He reaches down and covers Polina’s hand with his. “But I think he’s alive, and when we find him, I’ll give him a fair beating for making you wait.”

Polina laughs despite everything, despite the cold in her veins and the dark certainty that she has a life without Hikaru to look forward to, even though she’d barely known him a year before. Rosemary stirs against her shaking chest and Jim smiles fondly at both of them.

“You’re indulging me,” she sighs, but her smile doesn’t fade immediately. Jim’s doesn’t, either.

“No, I really believe it. We’d know if he were dead.”

“Tell me honestly what might have happened, then.” She stops herself short of demanding an explanation of what’s happened from him, fully aware that it isn’t fair of her to demand something from him that he can’t give her. She’s held together too long to lose it now.

“Honestly?” He looks past her bed to the window and sighs. “He could be a prisoner, but—don’t look at me like that just yet—but he wouldn’t necessarily be doomed that way.”

Polina counts to herself, tells herself that this is just the way it is, Jim is only telling her the truth, and tries to remember how to breathe.

“Have a little faith. There’s a lot I don’t know, but I know that whatever’s happened, Sulu’s a tough guy. He can handle a lot, and he’s as stubborn as you or I are.” Jim trails off slowly and squeezes her hand as warmly as she knows he can before he pulls away, holding the curtain for her bed in one hand. “Get some more rest. You’ll need it.”

Her jaw unsticks and she stares at him, gauging the meaning of those words. “Tell Mr. Spock I’ll be there Monday morning.”

He looks surprised, looks like he’ll object, but then he shrugs. “I never expected any less. Good day, Mrs. Sulu.”

“Polina,” she reminds him when he closes the curtain, and the only indication that Jim’s heard her is the soft laughter that drifts back toward her. She closes her eyes and tries to follow his suggestion to get some rest, but all that sticks in her head is his words, worked through her imagination, and a hundred different situations that could have happened.

When she finally falls asleep, she dreams fitfully of his death, plummeting from the sky and driving deep into the landscape, a gunshot through the dark, cold and alone and further beyond her reach than he's ever been, as if she’s ever been in any way capable of protecting him.

*

The smell of smoke is distinctively pungent in the cold air when Hikaru wakes up, his eyelashes frozen and shivering. There’s danger of hypothermia and death if he sleeps, but collapsing of exhaustion isn’t an option, either. The days blur together, but he’s kept count of them since he escaped. Not long enough to be dead, but long enough that he’s wearing down and finding game is getting harder. The smoke is only a confirmation of what he already knew, that he’s getting closer to fighting and it’s only a matter of time before he encounters someone, whether they’re German or otherwise.

His breath fogs in front of him and he pushes up from the ground, stamping his feet for warmth and not even caring it leaves boot prints behind that could identify him. It isn’t like he’s trying to hide anymore, sure now that the Germans who captured him were put off long enough by the other soldier’s lie.

When he’s warmed up enough, he starts walking again, stiff-legged and sore everywhere, especially from his ribs, which feel bruised rather than broken, but painful enough that breathing the icy air is still a laborious task. It takes a while before he finally sees the smoke rising toward the clouds and closes his eyes before he starts toward it carefully. He isn’t keen on the idea of walking back into German hands, but his options are limited enough that he’ll consider it after scouting the area a little more.

It takes the better part of two hours for him to get close enough to the source of the smoke that he hears shouts and voices, dissipating the theory he’d formed that he was on his way to a bombed-out town and the possibility of quiet, sullen survivors who would be not unreasonably unhappy to see any soldier, even one without a gun. The shouts are still faint, but Hikaru speeds up, thinking of home: San Francisco and the warmth of the sun, Polina and the spring of their courtship, when it was warm and her laugh came easily. He convinces himself that even if this doesn’t work out, he’ll still make it back to her one day, some day.

The first person he sees is one who sees him first, and it takes a few, long seconds for his heart to unclench when he realizes that their uniforms aren’t German, not even Italian, and he coughs out a laugh of relief.

By the time the soldier makes it up to him, three others running up after him, Hikaru is still laughing insanely, more relieved to see the stars and stripes on their uniforms than he thought he would be, even when they exchange a few uncomfortable looks.

“Sarge,” one of them calls down the hill toward a lanky man with round glasses and his helmet too far forward on his forehead. “I think we’ve got one that’s cracked.”

“I’m not,” he manages, struggling for breath through his aching ribs when the sergeant reaches the top of the hill. “I’m Hikaru Sulu.”

“I think _I’m_ cracked,” one of the others mumbles under his breath, and grunts when the guy next to him elbows him hard.

The sergeant doesn’t say anything for a moment, examining what’s left of Hikaru’s uniform while he struggles for the circular tags around his neck and holds them out for him to examine, which he does with a stony, unreadable expression.

“You’re a long way from the rest of your squadron, Sulu,” he says with an air of finality, dismissing any questions about the matter before they rise, and presses the discs back into his hand, gesturing to the others to help him to his feet. “We’ll talk after you’ve gotten down to battalion aid.”

He nods at him gratefully and starts to open his mouth, even though he doesn’t know what to say, not even a quiet prayer in relief, or thanks, but the sergeant shakes his head and adjusts his weapon, silencing him easily.

*

Mid-afternoon sun filters through the window at the far end of the long room, warming the whole room. Hikaru’s bed is situated in the center, just far enough away that he can only barely hear the sounds from the streets below, and when he blinks his eyes open he’s sure once more that this is just a dream.

He grunts softly and pushes himself up, cautious of the bandages wrapped tightly around his ribs so they heal straight and clean.

“Whoa there.” Hands reach out and grab his arm before he pulls on the IV line, which he actually feels more acutely than before, though he’d known it was there. Hikaru isn’t remotely surprised to see that it’s Jim smiling at him from the chair next to his bed, but he clears his throat a few times before he can speak.

“You haven’t been waiting by my bedside, have you?” he asks, leaning back against the pillows Jim stacks up behind him.

“Your near-widow needed to sleep sometime,” Jim says and Hikaru catches the glint of amusement in his eye. “No, I’ve only been here a few minutes. Polly’s sleeping with Rosie right now. They’re both a little worn out by the excitement.”

The words hit him hard, and Hikaru slumps back against the pillows. He’s known that the baby must have been born, and he faintly remembers someone telling him that it was a little girl before he was transferred back to Britain to finish recovering, after his identity was confirmed and everything was worked out along with his diagnosis of frostbite.

“I promised to beat you when we found you again.” Jim looks comfortable in his chair and looks up toward the ceiling, like he’s only musing aloud for Hikaru’s benefit. “But since you look so damn miserable, I’ll let you pretend we did it already.”

“As if I don’t feel bad enough missing the whole thing.”

Jim looks down at him with clear, warm eyes. “She’s a tough girl, Hikaru. Spock thought he’d stop her from working after the operation—Cesarean, by the way. Your daughter’s named after Bones because of it. Anyway, Uhura brought her work. She couldn’t stand being still knowing you were out there.”

Hikaru smiles and closes his hand around the blankets. He knows that Polina’s strong enough to take care of herself. She was when he met her, but Jim’s words are almost like validation of what he knew about her, why he loves her. “She’s not mad?”

“Not as much as she’s glad that you’re okay,” he quips. “I was right, though. I never stood a chance of pulling you away from here with a girl like her.”

He’s laughing and swearing at Jim before he can stop himself, his ribs too sore to laugh again. Hikaru is mostly sure he injured them again the day he was found in Italy, but when he forces the laughter back down, the overwhelming joy of being alive again, he shakes his head. “Is that your way of telling me you approve?”

“I always approved.” Jim stands up and stretches and Hikaru’s smile falters, realizing that he believed one of Jim’s lies: he’s been there for at least an hour or two, waiting for him to wake up to make sure someone was there to answer his questions. Hikaru thinks of him when he was still a captain, the solemn conversation over his desk and the pause before he left a flourishing signature on his discharge papers, and wonders if this is that same kind of sympathetic benevolence.

“I owe you a lot of favors right now,” Hikaru says, and Jim rubs his hands through his hair when he comes out of his stretch.

“I’ll hold onto them, then,” he laughs, pulling on his hat. “And I’ll tell your wife to come see you when you’re both awake.”

*

Returning to his quarters feels anti-climactic after the uproar for weeks, but Jim welcomes the opportunity to lose himself in something mundane for a while before actually sleeping, something he doesn’t do often enough. It’s part of the war, he knows, and not many people are sleeping well, or at all, so he’s lucky enough that he can. He doesn’t expect to find Nora’s door open when he comes inside, and though her room was perfectly in order before, there’s nothing left in it now but an immaculately packed set of bags in the center of the floor.

“What the hell,” he mumbles, and finds Nora pulling her coat off the hook behind the door when he steps inside.

“Jim,” she says and looks guilty, like she didn’t expect to see him. “I thought you were staying at the hospital.”

He doesn’t even dignify that with an answer, but when he reaches for the door handle to close it behind him, she pulls it back and frowns. He knows _that_ look, too, the stubborn, unyielding one that he can’t push back against.

“I resigned,” she finally says, giving in first, though the words hang heavily in the air for a few seconds. Jim knows what she said, but his ears are ringing and she’s avoiding his eyes. “As Pike’s aide. I’m going to a hospital in London until they send me to a field hospital somewhere.”

“I don’t…” He shakes his head slowly, then harder, and clenches his hand into a tight fist, staring at her directly and waiting for her to stop looking away. “You’re going to meet your husband?”

Nora scoffs, “Jim, I’m a doctor. I want to go be a doctor, and…” She trails off when she finally meets his eyes and his patience runs out.

“You’re running away because this scares you, because you _know_ that I—”

“This isn’t about you, goddammit!”

The corporal in the doorway freezes, hands outstretched for her bags, and Jim looks at him guiltily. He picks up the bags and scurries out as fast as he can and Jim curses while Nora slows her ragged breath.

“Bones.” She’s lying about it, he knows what this is, even if going to be a doctor is a _real_ reason that she’s inflated enough to hide that she’s still running, she’s still afraid. She’s just a terrible liar and doesn’t know it. “This is what you want, right?”

She holds her coat against her chest and holds his gaze, reaching out to squeeze his arm on her way out the door. Jim takes her arm gently and looks down at her, but she doesn’t falter this time. “I’m going to see what happens with Joshua,” she says and he lets go without a fight as she continues, “ _After_ the war is over.”

“I’ll call you then,” he reminds her and she laughs, but doesn’t turn back when he’s left standing in her empty room, pretending he can’t hear the quickly swallowed, crackling sob echoing down the hall back toward him.

*

Hikaru is awake when Polina and Rosemary are finally allowed into the ward in the late evening, though he’s sure he heard a quiet argument outside in the corridor before they came in that he suspects was the matron’s vehement opposition of an infant on the ward and Polina’s stubborn refusal to listen. He’s smiling when they make it to his bed, but they both laugh together when she sits down cautiously on the edge of the bed. Rosemary is deeply asleep, unaware that there’s anything of importance going on, but Hikaru thinks he likes her that way: innocently unaware of the way things can be and the way things are.

“This wasn’t exactly the way I thought this was going to turn out,” he admits quietly when he wipes his thumb under her eyes and bites back tears of his own.

“I’m too glad you’re all right to be _angry_ at you right now,” she says fiercely and the both laugh, bumping their foreheads together before a clumsy kiss. Rosemary is pressed against her chest and his hands are in her hair, but the ward is otherwise quiet enough now that the others in the room are asleep.

“Stay here tonight,” he urges her quietly, and she just wrinkles up her forehead at the idea that he’d consider her staying anywhere else and assembles a makeshift cradle beside his bed with a few extra blankets and a small cot the night nurse brings them when Hikaru asks. The bed is too small for it, but Polina climbs in next to him, mindful of all his wounds and her tender abdomen, and rests her head next to his on the pillow.

“Spock sends his best,” she says quietly, resting her hand on his cheek. “And Nyota. Jim said he’d already seen you.”

“Since when are you on first name terms with Jim Kirk?” he teases, tickling behind her ear. He knows there’s a lot he’s missed, a lot he’ll hear in the months to follow, but this is enough for now, just chatting lightly about it with her like it hasn’t changed everything, even how much they value one another. Her eyes flutter and close while he brushes her hair back, but open again a few moments later.

“I’m going back to recon flights in a few weeks,” he tells her softly, but she only smiles.

“Good,” she says. “I have work to do, too.”

He frowns and touches her cheek, sure he’ll never get enough of this. “Don’t you think you should wait a little longer?”

Polina doesn’t even have the energy to look stern. “We’ll talk about it later,” she says instead of arguing the point.

She’s asleep before he is, and Hikaru spends as long as he can just listening to the sound of her breathing, her heartbeat pulsing against his wherever he touches her. It’s not over, he’s not sure it will be for a while, but it doesn’t matter. There’s just now, this moment of peace.


	4. Epilogue

_December 1947, San Francisco_

Since arriving in the U.S. a week before, it feels like they’ve been everywhere and seen everything, and a lot has changed from Hikaru’s memory in seven years. Most of the time, though, Hikaru feels like it can’t have been so long since he left, since he even met Polina at all. The time since the end of the war, the time of peace, has gone by much slower and much faster still than the war ever did, the difference is that there’s so many things that happened during the war that he remembers in pristine detail and other things that are like hazy shadows to him, even now. Two and a half years with Polina since the end of the war, renting a flat and dreaming of buying a house, those memories are much sharper to him than anything else in his life has ever been. San Francisco keeps changing in the meantime and his family with it, but when the three of them came off the airplane, he and Polina and Rosemary clinging to Polina’s hand from behind her skirts, Hikaru had been struck with the blunt, immediate recognition of his mother and sisters standing in a huddle, waiting for them.

They’re all so much thinner than they had been when he left, and even two years hadn’t been enough since they came back to their home, whatever was left of it that their neighbors had managed to preserve for them. His mother lost three teeth in the camp, and Tomiko got married, but Eri married after the war and is enormously pregnant with her second child. Hikaru knows how it is and how it’s been—he received letters all the time about how things were after the war, sent money to help them often, and stayed up a lot of nights without telling Polina until she came out to the sitting room with him and held his hand until he told her everything. Things were better after that, even though she rolled her eyes and grumbled at him for his secrets, and for all of her bravado at the time, she shrunk back with Rosemary until Mari pulled her into a tight hug and Tomiko crouched down to introduce herself brightly to Hikaru’s small daughter.

The four of them, his mother and sisters, are visiting his father’s church for the late mass, but Hikaru quietly deferred before they left, citing the lingering effects of the time difference even though they all know that it’s only that Hikaru wants a little time with Polina and Rosemary. They looked disappointed, but their mother brushed it off and bid them to rest that evening, they would be there afterward, and that mattered more. Hikaru’s extended family will come home with his mother and sisters after mass for Noche Buena because they all want to see Hikaru, want to meet his wife, who has looked permanently overwhelmed since they arrived.

Polina looks up helplessly from the living room floor when the doorbell rings, and so Hikaru is the one who drops the knotted strand of Christmas tree lights and jogs to the door, calling ahead to keep the bell from ringing again.

“I’m coming,” he says again, but when he opens the door and finds Kirk standing there, he forgets not to stare while trying to regain speech. Finally, he stammers out, “Kirk. I didn’t—what are you doing here?”

“Nice to see you, too, Sulu,” Kirk laughs and a blast of cool night hair comes in the door, though Hikaru has felt winters too much colder than this one to be bothered by it. He shakes off his surprise and steps aside for him, and Kirk comes into the entrance hall. “Pike’s in San Francisco. I know you and Polly were going to stop by Washington before you left to see me, but it’s—”

“But it’s Christmas,” Hikaru supplies and starts to steer him to the living room, which Kirk resists, shifting his weight and shaking his head. “I thought you weren’t Pike’s aide anymore.”

“I’m not. I retired from the service last year.” Kirk leaves his jacket on, even when Hikaru holds out a hand for it, and this situation is too familiar to be comfortable. “I had some business I wanted to talk to him about, and since I figured you’re in town, too, I’d get a peek at Rosie before Bones can.”

“How are you two…?” It’s the only thing Kirk won’t talk about when he sends letters, and Hikaru can count on one hand the number of times that Nora has written since he saw her off in Paris when her tour of duty ended the year before, and all they have as evidence is a faded postmark from Alpharetta, Georgia on a single letter and two birthday notes for Rosemary.

“Just been to see her, actually,” he tells him, deflecting the question neatly, but there’s something he’s not saying. The cheer in his voice is Jim’s only tell, the only indication that there’s anything at all to find out; something bad, or something inexplicably good. If anything, it means that Jim hadn’t just _happened_ to be in town if he’s been in Georgia recently.

“Shit, Jim,” Hikaru laughs and shakes his head. “What the hell is going on? I didn’t even know the two of you were talking, but how is she?”

“We’ll catch up in Washington, she sends her best,” Jim says airily, and Hikaru doesn’t know what to say to that, thinks only that they won’t, probably not about Nora, so he just nods numbly and looks away, too.

“You can stick around a while. My family won’t be back until late, but there’s food and a party’s better than going back to whatever hotel they’ve put you up in.” Hikaru pushes his hand through his hair and wishes he were even a little more prepared for this conversation, even if Kirk had only called to let him know he was coming. He doesn’t like surprises, and he likes them even less when it’s Kirk delivering them.

“I’ve got to get back pretty soon. I’m just dropping in to say hello.” There’s a moment where Hikaru stares straight at Kirk and knows that he’s trying to bullshit him, no matter how hard he’s trying to hide it. Kirk stares back, and then he closes his eyes and laughs. “Right. I’ll be brief. I was going to bring it up when you came to visit, but since I’m already in San Francisco, it’d be a little more convenient if you’ve had a few days to let things settle.”

“I don’t like this, Kirk,” he tells him bluntly and hears Polina persuading Rosemary to take her hand so they can go upstairs for a bath. “I know how this conversation ends.”

“You just know how the last one ended. Let me say my piece, and you can think about it.”

Hikaru can barely manage to get out his embittered ‘Fine’ before Kirk sighs out a breath of apparent relief.

“I retired from the service to join up with the OSS. That’s not really important right now. What’s _important_ is that there’s another agency on the rise and it’s bigger than the OSS was, or even the intel work I was doing before. It’s bigger than what we were doing in the war. There are going to be more wars, they’re coming, and we’re doing everything we can to stop them.” Kirk’s eyes flare as he talks, but Hikaru’s stomach sinks further when he sees that. He knows enough to recognize that Kirk’s passions are the forces that change lives, and he’s trying to change Hikaru’s.

“We were supposed to come home after the war, Kirk,” he interrupts, keeping his voice low to keep from disrupting the faint splashing and laughter echoing down the hallway from where the nightly bath is going on. “We did our part. We were just going to come home.”

“What have you been doing over there, Hikaru? I checked, you were one of the lucky ones, and you’re still serving, but when you’re released, what are you going to do for you, or for your family? There’s nothing there, there won’t be for years. This is important,” Kirk tells him urgently. “The Soviets aren’t going to play nice because we were allies in the war, it’s not like it was.”

“And what good am I going to be?” he asks, but it’s _not_ like was before. Hikaru feels so much older, as if a thousand years have passed since they had a conversation like this, and he’s probably so much wiser than he’d been before. He knows that this conversation doesn’t end well in any universe, not with his heart beating like this, like he’s dodged bullets a couple times too many and this one he’s going to have to take.

“Don’t be coy, Hikaru,” Kirk tells him firmly. “You’re a damn talented pilot, you’ve got the experience we need, and—”

“If you tell me they’ll give me my citizenship back, Jim, I’ll throw you out of the house. But it’s Christmas and I really don’t want to do that.”

“They will,” Kirk says dismissively, and that’s beside the point here, this isn’t some favor Kirk is trying to do for him in exchange for another. “But what I was going to say is that we’ll take care of the rest. And Polly—”

“What about her?” he asks abruptly, turning to look out toward the staircase, and though he can’t see them, he can imagine Polina laughing with Rosemary, the ends of their curls damp. Everything he’s doing is for them, and if he’s not sure what’s going to happen in six months, a year, whenever he’s released, he _is_ sure that it’ll be for both of them, his wife and his daughter; the two of them so much greater than those abstract terms that Kirk is referring to them in.

“Is she really happy being a wife? A mother at home with a daughter, waiting for news from you whenever you can send it? It’s not an easy life on anyone, I _know_ that.” Kirk keeps his voice lower, and Hikaru swallows hard. “It’s worse on her, I can really only imagine. She’s not used to that, she’s not good at it.”

“What do you know about what Polina needs or doesn’t need, or anything?” Hikaru demands, but he has the sinking impression that Kirk is entirely right, not just because he was there more often than Hikaru could be during the war, but because he remembers the conversation in the hospital, the way he looked at him then. It isn’t even something Kirk knows that Hikaru doesn’t, because he knows, he _does._.

“I know she’s smart as hell, that she’s got more potential than she’s going to ever use working as a secretary over there. I know we could use her, and she’d be happy doing what we need, being useful. And,” Kirk adds with a smile, “I’ve also known for a long time that you two come as a matched set. I want you there, and I want her there. Lucky me, I just have to convince one of you to get both.”

“You’re a manipulative son of a bitch,” Hikaru swears feebly and rests his head in his hand.

“Resourceful,” Kirk corrects him. “Think about it, Hikaru. You’ve got some time before you’re in Washington to talk it over with her. And, hell, I’d like to work with you two again. We did truly awesome things in the war, all of us.”

“Fuck you, Kirk,” he laughs bitterly, pushing his hair back and listening to the sounds of their normal life, Polina picking Rosemary out of the bath and drying her, their mingled laughter; a promise of normalcy none of them could ever really have.

“Just think about it,” he says and straightens his coat, turning back toward the door.

Hikaru follows after him, closing the door behind him and watching Kirk shuffle down the front stairs. “My father wasn’t a hero, Jim,” he reminds him, holding onto the doorknob like an anchor, something to center him here, where he can still think about this rationally before getting caught up in Kirk’s plans.

“Yeah, I know.” Kirk turns briefly, blue eyes glinting and a faint, dangerous sort of smile playing on his lips, just before he starts walking. “But you are.”

He’s right about all of it, but Hikaru doesn’t even have the will to resent him when Polina comes downstairs again, all smiles and glowing excitement when she closes her hands around his and kisses him slowly. It isn’t the time to talk about it with her, not yet, so he’ll let her have a few more days of her innocent cheer before he brings up Kirk’s proposal; a few more days of their quiet, fleeting peace before they’ll give it up entirely one more time, together.


End file.
